TO PREP FOR HER ROLE AS RAMONA,
the stiletto-sharp ringleader of a crew of enterprising
strippers in Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez was nothing if not
dedicated: She trained with a pole choreographer/
aerialist for months and even had portable stripper
poles at the ready in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles
so she could practice carousel spins wherever she hap-
pened to be. And she wore her commitment to the role
in bruises earned after every session.
“I have danced all my life and I work out every single
day,” says the star, 50. “And I can say without hesitation
that learning to pole dance was one of the most chal-
lenging things I’ve ever done.”
It was all in order to bring a fascinating real-life tale
to the big screen. Inspired by Jessica Pressler’s 2015
New York magazine article “The Hustlers at Scores”—
which detailed how exotic dancers from the famed
Manhattan strip club seduced, drugged, and scammed
wealthy Wall Street clients out of massive sums of
cash—Hustlers (Sept. 13) is “about greed, power, and the
American dream, and what a certain group of women,
who worked in a field where they were degraded and
discounted, will do to achieve it,” says Lopez, who pro-
duced the film with her fiercely loyal Hollywood squad:
longtime business partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas
and manager Benny Medina. (Will Ferrell and Adam
McKay were also among the producers.)
But this is not a movie about glitter-dusted Robin
Hoods in eight-inch Louboutins sticking it to the one
percent. “They’re not heroes, they’re humans,” says Con-
stance Wu, 37, who plays Destiny, a struggling woman
who turns to stripping in order to provide for her grand-
mother and daughter. The story is told largely through
her character’s eyes, as Ramona takes Destiny under her
wing and teaches her the art of the steal—spiking men’s
drinks and swiping their credit cards. Says Wu: “It
doesn’t romanticize what it is to be a stripper or what it is
to steal from rich men. It’s an exploration of the origin
stories of these women.”
Writer-director Lorene Scafaria, 41, wanted to make the
film precisely because its heroines were morally complex.
“We’ve certainly seen a million movies about male charac-
ters like this and haven’t fully needed them to sit in either
camp” as saviors or outlaws, she says. In this way, the
women of Hustlers are more like the ethically compro-
mised mafiosos on The Sopranos than the protagonists of
most female-driven fare. That wasn’t the easiest sell in
Hollywood. Several studios were only interested in the
project if Scafaria ( best known for 2016’s The Meddler)
morphed the story into something far more lighthearted.
The director stuck to her guns. Understanding that
any movie about stripping risks coming off as camp,
Scafaria says she worked hard to focus on the humanity
of her dancers and didn’t judge their work. “Women are
constantly sexualized, but when they find a way to profit
from it, suddenly it’s a problem,” says Lopez, whose
fellow strippers are played by singers Cardi B, 26, and
Lizzo, 31, as well as Scream Queens’ Keke Palmer, 26,
and Riverdale’s Lili Reinhart, 23. “Strippers are painted
as throwaways or background characters,” Lopez con-
tinues. “Hustlers digs into stories of their lives; the
good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Scafaria and her cast—including Lopez—did their
homework, visiting strip clubs in New York City to learn as
much as they could about erotic dance. “I not only watched
the ladies do their routines, I talked to them about what it
was like to have a career as a dancer,” says Lopez, who dis-
covered the old working-my-way-through-college stripper
cliché happened to be true. “I think it would surprise peo-
ple that most of these women are students, or young moms
just trying to get by in a world that doesn’t offer those on
the fringe many chances.”
There was also stripper boot camp. Lopez trained with
the movie’s “pole coordinator”—choreographer and
Cirque du Soleil aerialist Johanna Sapakie, who previ-
ously worked with Madonna and Miley Cyrus. “I was
using a completely new group of muscles—it was tough,”↑
Clockwise
from top
Jennifer Lopez
and Constance
Wu are thick as
thieves; Cardi B
and Lizzo party
up in the club.
Says director
Lorene Scafaria
of the stars’
dance skills:
‟They’re absolute
athletes. We
[shot] it like a
sports movie.”