Jennifer Lopez Sizzles in New Pole Dancing Video

Jennifer Lopez shared a new video showing off the pole dancing skills she picked up while making Hustlers, her latest movie. In the film, she plays a veteran stripper who joins other strippers to scam and rob wealthy men who visit their New York City strip club. The film hits theaters on Friday and had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival Saturday night.

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone… This was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done physically. But it was all worth it in the end,” Lopez wrote in the Instagram caption.

Lopez also added a link to the full 13-minute video about how she mastered pole dancing on YouTube. The video shows Lopez getting instructions on how to pull off the dance moves with the pole.

“I mean, this is just as hard as anything I’ve ever learned,” Lopez said in the clip. “Maybe one of the hardest.”

Hustlers is based on Jessica Pressler’s New York Magazine article “The Hustlers at Scores,” about a group of strippers who scam wealthy men during the late-2000s financial crisis. It was directed by Lorene Scafaria and also stars Constance Wu, Cardi B, Keke Palmer, Julia Stiles, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo and Mercedes Reuhl.

In an interview with Uproxx, Scarfaria said after she read Pressler’s article, she felt the need to tell a story like this from the perspective of the women.

“Writing for me has always been an exercise in empathy, so I wanted to see if we could walk a mile in their shoes and tell that story and explore a world that we have seen so much of in other movies and TV shows, but not really that many from their perspective,” she explained.

“There’s such a stigma around strippers and sex workers and what they do for a living so that, honestly, was the biggest challenge and why I thought it was a responsibility in telling the story because I understood where they were starting from,” Scarfaria continued. “Part of it was reading between the lines of that article and realizing there was an interesting friendship story here about these two women who started this business.”

The director said once she finished writing the script, she realized Lopez was the perfect actress for Ramona.

“The two of them are the same; they have all of these similar qualities,” she told Vulture. “It has to be her.’ Casting was made infinitely easier once Jennifer was attached. Everybody really, really, really wanted to work with Jennifer. That was the beauty of making this movie, too: casting what felt like the right people for each part, and watching them interact the way that they should with each other.”

Reinhardt told Entertainment Weekly the movie is “definitely” going to surprise audiences.

“It’s a lot more than a stripper movie,” the Riverdale star said. “You’re getting a story about friendship, these women, and survival. When I watched the film for the first time, I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that they’re strippers, I was like, oh, these are just women and this is their career…. It’s not a movie about strippers, that just happens to be what they do.”

Photo credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images