In an episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast that aired on Nov. 4, the comedy trio – consisting of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer – reminisced about their time on Saturday Night Live, specifically when actress Amy Adams hosted the show in 2008, Entertainment Weekly reports. Samberg recalled a particular song they pitched to Adams, who quickly nixed the idea for its raunchiness and its proximity to the actress’s appearance in the hit Disney film Enchanted, which had been released four months prior to her SNL appearance.
Samberg said:
I’m not gonna 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… It was basically like we were both really old and we were having a 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 up anthem about that.
The trio read the lyrics of the song and even pre-recorded some of the track to play for Adams and gauge her interest. But while Adams was impressed, she still ultimately had to pass. Samberg continued:
“She was like, ‘That’s really funny. I can’t do that. 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.’”
Samberg Admits Adams Was Totally Right
Adams and Lonely Island instead created the digital short “Hero Song,” involving a superhero played by Samberg who gets badly beaten by a robber (Jason Sudeikis). While shooting the segment, Samberg witnessed an encounter on the street that made him realize Adams was right to nix the more explicit sketch.
Within 5 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…’ And it was very instructive for me. It’s not something I even ever thought about in our line of work, you know what I mean…? 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.
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Podcast co-host Seth Meyers added that some kids were allowed to watch SNL, increasing the likelihood of them seeing the raunchy song. Samberg agreed, adding that YouTube was in its infancy but still a viable source for finding anything and everything Amy Adams, including anything regrettable they might’ve done together.
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers releases weekly and features deep dives into the SNL Digital Shorts produced by the trio that began airing in 2005. Samberg recently returned to Saturday Night Live, portraying Doug Emhof opposite Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris. Adams will next appear onscreen in Nightbitch, an adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel of the same name, written and directed by Marielle Heller.
Listen to the Nov. 4 episode below.