Before anyone flips Salma Hayek Pinault upside down in the future, they’d better check with her first to make sure she has underwear on.
The actor just told Jimmy Kimmel — and everyone watching his late-night show — about a semiscandalous moment during filming “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” with Channing Tatum.
In line with the franchise built off Tatum’s history of working as an exotic dancer before making it in Hollywood, the movie features an elaborate sequence where Tatum gives Hayek Pinault a lap dance.
Dubbing the scene, ahem, “vigorous,” Kimmel declared, “He’s Channing all over your Tatum is what he’s doing!” But Hayek Pinault had specific details about part of the dance that didn’t make it into the movie. It happened when she and Tatum were rehearsing.
“I’m upside down, and my legs had to be somewhere, but upside down one loses sense of direction, and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do,” she said. “So I, in the rehearsal, I went, like, head down, almost hit my head … he held on to my pants.”
Only one problem with that.
“I was really concerned because my pants — he was pulling, my pants were going away and I couldn’t remember if I had underwear [on] or not, in this moment,” she said. “So instead of putting my hands to protect my head, I just held on to the pants.”
Tatum didn’t understand, she said, and hollered, “Put your hands up! … Put your hands up! Hold on to my legs!”
She just kept hanging on to her over-pants, in case she had no underpants. (It’s worth watching the video, if only to see her acting it out as she tells the story.)
“I’m like, no no no, until everybody came in and kind of took me away from him,” Hayek Pinault said. “And he said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
“I said, ‘What’s wrong with ME?’”
Still, Hayek Pinault said it was about time that she, in her role as Maxandra Mendoza, got to be on the receiving end of an exotic dance.
“I deserve it,” she said. “Because I had to play the stripper in so many movies before, and now I got to sit down and enjoy!” She reveled in the fact that she didn’t have to take her clothes off during the scene or spend her whole day gyrating around a stripper pole.
“Magic Mike’s Last Dance” hits U.S. theaters Feb. 10.