Andy Samberg says Amy Adams turned down filming a “very dirty” song for a Saturday Night Live skit once — but for the sweetest reason.
While appearing on an episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast released last week, Andy — who makes up one third of the Lonely Island comedy trio alongside Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — revealed why Amy refused to do the NSFW song while hosting SNL in March 2008.
The comedian explained that the Oscar nominee decided against it to protect the young fans of her film, Enchanted.
At the time, the Disney movie, in which Adams played princess-to-be Giselle, had just been released months before she appeared on the late night sketch show.
“I’m not going to go into great detail about it, but it was a song that would have been a duet with me and Amy Adams, and it was very dirty,” Andy said of the scrapped tune. “It was basically, like, we were both really old and we were having a picnic, like, old people couple, and one of us gets stung by a scorpion.
“And then I’m dying or something, and the one lament on my deathbed is that we didn’t explore things more sexually in our life, and it’s this huge up anthem about that,” he continued.
Andy went on to share that Amy knew the tune could be problematic after he ran past some of the song’s raunchy lyrics with her.
“She was like, ‘That’s really funny. I can’t do that,’” the SNL alum recalled.
“‘Little girls are so obsessed with Enchanted right now. They will find this, and it will be scarring for them, and I just can’t mix that right now.’”
The Nightbitch star ultimately passed on the bit, but did team up with Andy on Hero Song during her hosting debut on SNL.
In that skit, Andy appeared as a knockoff Batman who gets pummeled by fellow former cast member Jason Sudeikis for trying to stop him from robbing Amy.
Andy said an unexpected encounter with one of Amy’s fans while filming the skit made him realise that the actor made the right call.
“When we went out to shoot Hero Song, within five minutes, a mother and her little girl walked up, and the look on the little girl’s face upon seeing Amy Adams, I was like, ‘Oh, she was so right,’” he said.
“It was very instructive for me,” he added. “It’s not something I even ever thought about in our line of work, you know what I mean? Of like, ‘she actually has an obligation and a responsibility to those kids’, and she took it really seriously. And I remember being really impressed by that.”
Andy also spoke about how the internet could have contributed to the discarded song being a part of Amy’s life forever.
“It also spoke to the internet’s influence,” he said. “Up until that point, YouTube and stuff — [it] was a year or two into it even existing and being a thing that people would be like, ‘I’m going to watch everything with Amy Adams because I love Enchanted,’ and accidentally finding that proposed song.”
Listen to the Lonely Island podcast episode below.