Joe Manganiello Talks About Necessary Nudity and Destructive Male Strippers

For his character known provocatively as "Big Dick Richie" in the upcoming film Magic Mike, True Blood's Joe Manganiello reveals that he interviewed a one-time male stripper as research, but won't tell whether he stuffed his G-string, in a new cover profile for Out magazine.

For his role in the eagerly anticipated Magic Mike, dubbed by numerous bloggers as simply "the stripper movie," which costars Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, Alex Pettyfer, and Matt Bomer, and which is based on Tatum’s pre-film career, Manganiello interviewed a former male stripper to research the era. “All the guys he worked with were dead or in rehab,” the actor tells Out's William Van Meter, “but it was the time of his life — this insanely destructive lifestyle, this club life. It was sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll ...and getting paid to take your clothes off and have sex.”

In the film the 6'5 Manganiello plays a presumable well-endowed stripper known as "Big Dick Richie." When asked if it was necessary to stuff his G-string to live up to the challenging sobriquet, he demurs and answers, “Um, I’ll let everybody see the movie and they can decide.”

Manganiello also discusses the nudity that's frequently required of him on True Blood, the supernatural series from out creator Alan Ball. “As far as the butt cheeks stuff goes,” the actor says, “it just makes sense. It’s not gratuitous; it’s realistic. If you’re a werewolf and you transform, you lose everything and there are your butt cheeks. The show is a deconstruction of supernatural creatures. It’s not like other werewolf projects, where you magically reappear with tiny jean shorts on.”