‘The Life of Chuck’ cast breaks down the ‘hypnotic’ 5-and-a-half minute dance number

One of the most memorable scenes in director Mike Flanagan’s latest movie, The Life of Chuck, is a five-and-a-half-minute dance number featuring Tom Hiddleston and Annalise Basso. For Flanagan, pulling it off was a make-or-break moment for the film.

“The dance sequence, to me, was the crown jewel of the film. And if that didn’t work, the movie would not work,” the filmmaker tells Entertainment Weekly. 

Hiddleston stars as Charles “Chuck” Krantz, an accountant who inherited a love of dance from his grandmother, who taught him every style, from swing to Bossa nova, in their kitchen growing up. While traveling for a work conference, Chuck is strangely overcome by the music of a busking drummer on the street and can’t help but break into dance. Partway through, he invites a woman passing by to join him, and she accepts, matching him step for step as a crowd gathers to watch. It’s a glorious sequence to watch, but it wasn’t as easy to create as it looks on screen.  

To pull it off, Flanagan had to cast the perfect partner for Hiddleston’s titular character. He found it in Basso, with whom Flanagan worked on his directorial debut, Oculus. (Coincidentally, Basso appeared in the horror flick as a younger version of a character played by Karen Gillan, who appears in Act I of Chuck.) Unbeknownst to the director, though, Basso already had a lifelong love of ballet. 

When Flanagan learned over a lunch meeting that Basso had been dancing since she was 3, he recalls telling her, “I have a movie. I don’t know if it’s going to get financed or made, [but] I have just the thing for you.” 

“We had this really profound conversation just about where I’m at in my life, what I want for my career. And he, as Mike does, just provided this incredible opportunity to follow joy, and I think that’s what this movie is really about,” Basso adds.  

Next came crafting the perfect piece of music for the routine, which Hiddleston calls “ingenious” in the way it “progresses through different rhythms and styles of dance.”

“The whole sequence contains within it all of the dance styles that Chuck will have learned as a young man that his grandmother taught him, that he learned at the twirlers and spinners dance class in middle school,” he says. “They’re radically different rhythms, to go from jazz to swing to the cha-cha and then to bossa nova and the polka. The rhythm of the beat completely changes, and the rhythm of how the body has to move in accordance with that beat.”

Enter Emmy-winning choreographer Mandy Moore and drummer Taylor Gordon, known as the Pocket Queen. At first, track notes were sent back and forth between Gordon and Moore, but this process stilted the choreography. “I was like, ‘Can we just get Taylor in the room with us with the music team?'” Moore says. “And they were like, ‘Yes, scandalous, yes, let’s do it.’ And we ended up getting the drum kit and the music team and Taylor there with Annalise and Jonathan [ReDavid, Moore’s associate choreographer].”

“Meanwhile, Tom is in London learning the things off the video with my associate in London because we couldn’t put everybody together until the last minute. And so we’d make something or I’d think about something, send a video to Tom and Steph [Powell Baxter, assistant choreographer] in London, and then we’d work on something and then we’d video that and send it back.”

The unconventional solution ended up being “one of the most brilliant things I’ve ever been a part of,” says Moore, who’s worked on everything from So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing With the Stars to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and the Oscars. “I haven’t made a track with the people in the space for the camera. That was a next-level thing.”

Flanagan was “an enthusiastic observer” of the music-choreography process, he says. “I thought the dance would be two minutes, two-and-a-half by the time they were done with it, to fully express what everybody was making. They built a five-and-a-half-minute sequence that was hypnotic to me.” 

Finally, it was time to put it all together in Mobile, Ala., where the scene was filmed. After only one week of rehearsals at a small local dance studio in a strip mall, it was “tip to tail every day for four days” on the boardwalk, Basso says. “I lost count of how many times we did it.” 

Hiddleston performed the routine so many times that he “burned holes in the soles of my shoes,” he says, adding that the experience left him with a new appreciation for the art. “I definitely felt there’s a moment when we did it for four days…where it gave me lasting and eternal respect for dancers and their elite athleticism.”

Everyone involved in bringing the piece together emphasizes that it was a joyous experience, which underscores the movie’s message.

“What I love about this scene is that it depicts someone who stops in the middle of that and creates a moment of pure joy without any fear of judgment,” Flanagan says. “What it meant to me was there are so many opportunities in my day-to-day life that I do not take advantage of, that could be used to create joy out of thin air. We all have that opportunity, and it just takes a reminder to look around, listen to the music, feel the energy around us, and whatever it is that makes our heart sing.

“In Chuck’s case, it’s dance, but it could be piano, it could be painting, it could be cooking, it could be writing,” Flanagan continues. “We only have so many moments. We have a finite number of moments. We don’t know what that number is. We never can. We never will. So when you’re given an opportunity like that, seize it. And that, to me, is what The Life of Chuck is.”