It was Matthew McConaughey‘s idea to have club owner Dallas play the bongos. (And they’re the actor’s own bongos, too.)
“Well, I’m introducing this guy, played by Kevin Nash, a WWF wrestler, and he’s Tarzan, he’s one of my guys and he plays Tarzan,” the actor explained to the San Francisco Chronicle, “so it’s a jungle theme that he comes out to. So I said, ‘I wanna get the djembes and really make a jungle beat and call him out.’ Now it’s a pretty good scene but it probably won’t be as well remembered as my October-1999, get-arrested-for-playing-the-congas-in-the-birthday-suit scene.”
He didn’t originally mean to poke fun at himself like that, but he leaned into it once he realized it was all anyone was thinking about. “Funny how that was my most public session,” he quipped to Backstage of his naked-bongos arrest, “even though I was all alone. But my thought was that Dallas had to give these guys entrances and exits, I have to be this host with sounds and lights and music. It was never. ‘Oh, that would be funny for me to do that in a movie.’ What I said was. ‘That is what Dallas would do.’ Five steps later, I thought, ‘Oh, guess what? Because of that incident, it makes this even funnier.'”
McConaughey’s all-in performance certainly wowed his co-stars, Tatum telling E! News in 2012, “I didn’t think anybody could come in and beat what we wrote on the page, and boy were we wrong. On the first day, he was doing stuff we couldn’t even imagine.”