Murray Bartlett ‘Drilled’ the Choreography on Welcome to Chippendales

Murray Bartlett

Murray Bartlett is always up for a challenge. When he had to pretend to shit in a suitcase for The White Lotus, he rose to the occasion. But Welcome to Chippendales brought a whole new mountain to climb: strip-dance choreography. “It was a really good challenge,” Bartlett told Vulture at the show’s November 16 red-carpet premiere. “I’m not a professional dancer. Maybe you’ve noticed that.” As Chippendales second banana and stripper Svengali Nick De Noia, Bartlett had to not only act as if he knew how to dance but also pretend to know how to teachdance. Ironically, some of the actors he was “teaching” did have dance training. So while Bartlett pretended to know what he was doing, the background actors had to pretend they didn’t.

“I love a challenge like this, as an actor, where you have to make people believe that you know what you’re doing. So I drilled the choreography that I had to do,” he said. “The most challenging part was I had to do this scene where I’m teaching the dancers this routine. I have to do it towards them, so I’m mirroring the routine as they’re doing it, then flip around and do it the way they’re doing it. That kind of scrambled my brain, but I did it!”