MAGIC MIKE'S LAST DANCE

In Magic Mike's Last Dance, Channing Tatum's erotic dancer is now 40, in a relationship, and struggling to make sense of what is and isn't sexy - or indeed permissible in a MeToo world. Director Steven Soderbergh explains in his own words why the third and final Magic Mike movie goes further than ever before in a bid to expose modern truths...

- JAMIE GRAHAM

A third Magic Mike movie was kind of unexpected. We were a couple of years into working on a stage version of the show – a more traditional Broadway version – and that was all going on while Chan and Reid [Carolin, screenwriter] and the choreographic team were also developing the live show. I’d seen some very early schematic workshops of the live show, and thought it was intriguing. But I really wasn’t prepared, 18 months later, for what I saw in London, which was the finished version. And I was so captivated by it that I got on the phone, and said, “I think we should abandon the Broadway idea, and I would like to make a movie that is a fictionalised version of how Mike comes up with the idea for the live show.”

The basic premise of the movie is that Salma Hayek Pinault’s character offers Mike an opportunity to put on a show in London. So it’s another in a series of what I would call ‘process films’, where, like an Ocean’s movie, it’s an exploded view of somebody trying to solve a problem. In this case, it was a really fun mash-up of things that I like – one of them being: showing people solving problems, the other being: people dancing!