Saturday Night Live alum Andy Samberg has worked with a slew of celebrities throughout his years on the comedy sketch show, delivering hilarious, over-the-top scenes that often push the envelope with their explicit humor. However, not everyone he collaborated with was on board with his ideas.
Samberg is one-third of the comedy trio The Lonely Island, alongside Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer. The group joined SNL in 2005 and the ideas they came up with became viral sensations via the SNL Digital Shorts division of the show. In his podcast with fellow Lonely Island members and TV host Seth Meyers, aptly titled The Lonely Island Seth and Myers Podcast, Samberg recalled the instance when an SNL guest host declined to perform the song The Lonely Island wrote.
In 2008, Amy Adams was a guest host on SNL. She acted in a few sketches and appeared in the SNL Digital Short music video for “Hero Song” sung by Samberg, but that wasn’t the original pitch. As Samberg explained in the podcast, the initial concept was a “very dirty” duet that was supposed to be sung by him and Adams.
“It was basically like we were both really old and we were having picnic, 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 anthem about that.”
Samberg recited the lyrics and played part of the song, which Adams found hilarious. However, the actress said she couldn’t do it. “Little girls are so obsessed with Enchanted right now. They would find this, and it would be scarring for them, and I just can’t mix that right now,” she explained. Samberg thought nothing of it and decided to move on to the next idea.
Amy Adams made a sound decision
Enchanted was released in theaters just the year before Adams’ SNL appearance. She portrayed the role of Giselle, a young maiden who falls in love with a lawyer in New York City. The movie was a hit among both adults and children, and it was understandable that Adams didn’t want kids to see her performing anything raunchy.
It proved to be the right call. When Samberg and Adams were shooting the video for “Hero Song,” a young girl who was with her mother approached Adams with wide, adoring eyes, and it was then that Samberg truly realized why Adams had refused to perform the explicit song. He said it was an “instructive” moment for him, and before that, something he never thought of. He was truly amazed at how Adams handled it.
“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.”
YouTube had become popular by that time, and Samberg noted that it would have been easy for children to search for videos that had their idol Amy Adams in it, only to stumble upon the initial song he proposed. Adams reprised her role as Giselle in the Enchanted sequel titled Disenchanted, which was released in 2022.