The lap dance that almost killed Salma Hayek: “I couldn’t remember if I had underwear or not”
There are a thousand different ways to suffer a near-death experience on a movie set, but had the worst happened, Salma Hayek departing the mortal plane through death by lap dance would have comfortably been one of the strangest.
No matter how many precautions are put in place, there’s no such thing as a production that can be deemed 100% safe. Even on a micro-budget independent drama that unfolds entirely in a single room, you can’t definitely rule out the possibility of someone slipping on a banana peel and croaking.
Under normal circumstances, you’d imagine that intimacy coordinators would be the priority when shooting an exotic dancing scene. However, when Hayek was involved, it was the safety folks who were losing their shit, after a rehearsal almost went fatally awry, and she wasn’t even the one doing the dancing.
Of course, one of the most famous scenes of the Academy Award nominee’s career involves her busting some sultry moves on a stage in front of an audience, with the actor having no choice but to overcome her crippling fear of snakes to be cast in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, where Quentin Tarantino just happened to script a scene where his character drank tequila from her toes.
Almost three decades later, the dancer had become the dancee, with Channing Tatum gyrating himself towards a potential manslaughter charge on Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance. After the rehearsal’s brush with the grim reaper, Hayek admitted that the scene in its finished form didn’t make the final cut.
“There’s one part that’s not in, where I’m upside down, and my legs had to be somewhere,” she explained. “But upside down, one loses sense of direction, and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, so in the rehearsal, I went, like, head down, almost hit my head.” A near-miss, sure, but it was almost an embarrassing one, too.
Tatum was holding onto her trousers, but as Hayek recalled, “I was really concerned because my pants were going away, and I couldn’t remember if I had underwear or not in this moment.” As a result, instead of protecting her head from hitting the deck, she grabbed her kecks to preserve her dignity. Her co-star insisted she use her hands to brace the incoming fall, but she couldn’t.
Needless to say, the rehearsal ground to a halt, and Tatum didn’t seem too pleased. “He said, ‘What’s wrong with you?” Hayek remembered. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with me? You nearly killed me!”‘ It’s not quite Darwin Awards material, but a world-famous actor dying at the hands of a lap dance awry would nonetheless have made its way into the most ignominious pages of Hollywood’s history books.
Fortunately, she emerged unscathed, managing to save Magic Mike’s Last Dance from adding a lap dance-assisted fatality to its list of achievements, which would have been cruelly ironic in a franchise about strippers.
