A new trailer for Jennifer Lopez’s highly-anticipated film Hustlers has been released and features Cardi B giving castmate Constance Wu some pointers on her dancing skills. Interludes of the other girls shopping and causing mayhem are throughout the small vignette. There are Keke Palmer and glimpses of Lizzo presiding on brightly lit club stages in revealing outfits.
In other scenes, viewers see Constance Wu (Destiny) revealing parts of her story, like wanting to take care of her grandparents and occasionally go shopping. These two things seem like a motive for her to join the scheme. “You want them drunk enough to get their credit card but sober enough to sign the check,” Ramona (Lopez) advises Destiny on how to hustle wealthy men.
In a separate clip, Ramona teaches a shy Destiny a few moves on the pole. There’s the “peter pan,” “martini” and “carousel.” At first glance, it seems like she’s reluctant to hit the stage.
Amid the complexities that are attached to stripping, Wu said films like Hustlers are necessary because they give women the power of showcasing different parts of themselves without being pigeonholed into just being an exotic dancer. Everyone has a story, and more often than not these stories, in particular, are about survival.
“That’s why we make movies like this. These women are trying their best in a world that has not always been fair to them. That’s the hustle: trying to get that dream when you started out 10 steps behind everybody else,” Wu said to The Los Angeles Times.
In that same interview, Lopez dished on other scenes and talked about her experience working with Wu. “There is a scene in the movie that we filmed early on where Destiny and Ramona get into a fight, and Constance really went for it,” Lopez said. “And I was like, ‘Wow! OK. She is a gangster. We are going to do this movie.’ I think their storylines are fascinating because they start very similarly — same desires, same goals. But as they come more into their power and into more ‘success,’ their stories and thus their friendship really starts to diverge.”
Hustlers is based on a real-life story about a team of strippers in New York City that scammed wealthy Wall Street men. This story was first introduced in a 2015 issue of New York Magazine by Jessica Pressler. The film hits theaters Sept. 13.
Watch the trailer above.
