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Channing Tatum’s ‘crazy’ strippers’ conventions


Channing Tatum says it gets "zany and crazy" at strippers’ conventions.

The 34-year-old actor is currently working on a sequel to ‘Magic Mike’ which was loosely based on his experience as an 18-year-old stripper in Tampa, Florida.

‘Magic Mike 2′ is inspired by two "absolutely insane" strippers’ conventions he attended, one of which was in Raleigh, North Carolina where they danced for 3,000 women.

Talking to US GQ magazine, he said: "The women would come from miles and miles around.

"Then you lock the doors and you say all bets are off. It gets zany and crazy, and it’s a wild ride. It’s an incubator for insanity. It doesn’t matter almost what you do onstage. I don’t want to put anything in black and white on a page, but if you’ve been to one, you know how crazy it gets, and now pour kerosene on that. You’ve seen ‘Magic Mike’ — now multiply that. Mob mentality. It’s just exponentially crazier. I thought it was absolutely insane."

Tatum has tried to convince Steven Soderbergh – who directed the original – to helm the follow-up but he’s not going to do a u-turn on his recent retirement from movie directing and instead his longtime producing partner, Greg Jacobs, will take on the project.

He added: "It’s super complicated, in my opinion, why he wanted to stop doing film. I lobbied probably harder than anybody else–we had many, many nights of heated debate. I was, ‘I don’t f***ing get it! Why?’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t need it.’ "