The producers behind Bad Bunny’s triumphant Super Bowl LX Halftime Show had a problem: The NFL wouldn’t allow more than 25 carts to bring equipment on to the all-grass Levi’s Stadium field in Santa Clara, Calif. To pull off Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s and his creative team’s tremendous production plans, that meant something would have to give.
Luckily, a solution to one of the show’s most stunning visuals — the pastizales (grass fields and other plants) that harken back to Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rican landscape — was to make it real people. Production designers Bruce and Shelly Rodgers, as well as Julio Himede recruited around 380 people to dress up as the grass, allowing for easier on-and-off staging.
“That solution of making the plant people, and then the plant people getting on and off in time, plus all the sets and all the performers — it was audacious in every direction,” said creative director Harriet Cuddeford. “There were over 330 actual cast performers in addition to the plant people. It was just huge.”
Bad Bunny and the event’s producers and directors pulled off what may have been the most intricate halftime extravaganza in Super Bowl history. With superstar guests like Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, a real-life wedding and authentic business owners (including Los Angeles’ own Villa’s Tacos), the “Benito Bowl” was planned with many moving parts that could have gone wrong.
“There’s just so many variables in live TV,” Cuddeford said. “Even the weather. It was on a real grass field, and there’s no roof. We had to have backup rain plans. There were so many things that could have caused an issue. But it just kind of almost flawlessly unfolded before our eyes. We were all just like, ‘Wow, it worked!’”
Director Hamish Hamilton — who has produced countless Super Bowl Halftime Shows, Oscars, Emmys, Grammys and more — said, “It was the biggest team effort of a show I have ever been involved in.”
Here are some details Cuddeford and Hamilton shared about this year’s Bad Bunny halftime show.
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Bad Bunny managed to pull off several stunts while singing at the same time. At one point, much to the producers’ chagrin, the singer climbed a tall utility poll without any safety rigging.
“He refused to wear a harness,” Hamilton said. “He was like, ‘I don’t need it.’ There are all kinds of legal ramifications to that, which is not really my thing, but interestingly enough, when he decided he wasn’t going to wear a harness, we were able to then put a camera on the pole to look down at him climbing up!”
Added Cuddeford: “There was all safety and rigging and all of that available, obviously, of course, but he didn’t want it. He does his own stunts, that guy, and he learned it in about three minutes. Straight up that pole. At rehearsal, we were all like, ‘Is he gonna be OK?’ But he just went straight up there, and managed his vocals. Very agile. He could just, like, handle anything.”
Speaking of stunts, Bad Bunny falling through the roof of the pink casita was one thing — but it also had to be perfectly timed to the pre-tape of him doing the same thing as seen by the family watching TV inside.
“The stunt itself, to fall through the roof, wasn’t so crazy — there’s a trap door,” Cuddeford said. “They just literally open it, and pull it out underneath him. But it required so much meticulous planning, because we cut straight into the pre-tape. Inside the pre-tape was the shot on the TV of him falling through the roof of the Super Bowl — so the family in the la casita were watching the Super Bowl live, and then he fell onto their table. That’s basically two different pre-tapes: The pre-tape inside the house, and then there’s the pre-tape on the field of him falling through the roof during the dress rehearsal. And then comping that all together, then cutting to the transition of him falling through the roof and be able to kick the front door open.”
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The couple who got married during the halftime show is from Ontario, Calif., and had sent Bad Bunny a wedding invitation on a lark.
According to Hamilton, the engaged couple wound up with 15 extra wedding announcements — so they sent most to local businesses with the hope of maybe getting some free wedding perks. But the last invite? “They were like, ‘Why don’t we send one to Bad Bunny? Lots of people send wedding invitations to him, so why not,’” Hamilton said. “Bad Bunny’s office reached out, and they thought, ‘Amazing, maybe we’ll get a signed photo. But they were invited to a Zoom call, which they thought was kind of weird.”
On the Zoom call, they learned the plan: Bad Bunny was inviting them to get married at the Super Bowl. “It was like, an overprinting of wedding invitations led to a series of events where they wound up getting married during Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl!” Hamilton said.
The couple had planned to make Bad Bunny’s “Baile Inolvidable” be their first dance. “And so, they went from planning to play it at their wedding to being on the Super Bowl with him live, singing it,” Cuddeford said. “And with the bonus prize of Lady Gaga being the wedding singer as well.”
Despite rumors on social media, Bad Bunny didn’t hand his recently won Grammy to Liam, the young boy from Minnesota who had been imprisoned by ICE. But that moment is meant to convey a personal connection to the performer’s childhood.
“The kid is somebody that we cast,” Cuddeford said. “But the story behind that was Benito’s idea. He’d grown up watching his idols on TV getting awards. In his life now, he stands on stage and gets given awards by his idols. He knew the Grammys were coming up, and he was hoping to win something. And then obviously he won Best Album last weekend. And so, he really wanted to inspire the next generation.”
That’s why the boy at the Super Bowl was wearing an outfit similar to one a young Benito is seen wearing in a well-known photo of the superstar as a young child. “This is really representing a younger version of himself, with the hope of him inspiring the kids of today,” she said.
Did Bad Bunny get his Grammy back?
“I actually don’t know if he took it back,” Cuddeford said. “Knowing him, he might have just left it with the kid, honestly.”
Ricky Martin
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Bad Bunny personally selected Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin as his guests; Martin, of course, is a Puerto Rican childhood idol. And the song Martin sang, “Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii,” not only resonates in Puerto Rico, but in Hawai’i too.
“That’s a very meaningful song, almost kind of a plea to not turn Puerto Rico into Hawai’i,” Cuddeford said. “To make sure that it kind of retains its culture and its identity. It was just very powerful to have a Puerto Rican icon whom he deeply loves and respects to join him and to perform that song. It was something that during his residency, he had many guest artists would come and sing that. He’d never managed to align to have Ricky do it, so he was so excited to have Ricky do it at the Super Bowl.”
Those guest small business owners, vendors and workers are all real-life people, flown into the Super Bowl for the show.
That includes Los Angeles’ own Villa’s Tacos founder Victor Villa, as well as a real piragua (Puerto Rican shave ice dessert) vendor, boxers Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas, a real nail technician, barber and more. Even the priest that married the Ontario couple is an actual, ordained minister.
“The performance is celebrating normal people, and what it is to be human and love and have joy, and really appreciate one another,” Cuddeford said. “This was to show how much he values his community, to celebrate normal people on the world’s biggest stage, especially people who are of importance in in Latino culture. He’s a very authentic person, Benito, and it’s about just being authentic and very real and very human.”
And yes, that was Maria Antonia Cay, better known as Toñita, taking a shot with Bad Bunny inside a re-creation of her famed Brooklyn landmark the Caribbean Social Club.
“We faithfully recreated this iconic, very important for the culture, Puerto Rican bar in Brooklyn,” Cuddeford said. “And then we flew Toñita out to be part of the performance. And you saw him do the shot with her at the point in the song when he sings about doing a shot with Toñita.”
There were few hairy moments, including one that involved a camera crane spinning out of control.
That crane, which was used in the beginning sequence around the casita, lost digital connection — “So, literally, it started spinning like a hose out of control,” Hamilton said. “But probably a second before we needed the shot, the camera locked again in perfect position, and we were allowed to take it!”
And at another point, there’s a bit of a wobble from one of the low angle cameras that’s looking up at the casita. “Basically, everybody’s racing for a shot, and the handheld cameraman taking the shot gets hit by the Chapman dolly trying to make a shot after — and they collide, and that’s why there was a wobble. It’s split-second timing.”
Hamilton admitted it’s “terrifying” watching the camera operators running around each other as they get their shots. “In the performance of ‘NuevaYol,’ there are moments when the cameras literally get to their point of shooting half a second before they’re on,” he said. “The crane comes out, the cameras run half the way along a football pitch and literally, then run into Benito!”
Added Cuddeford: “The camera work was insane and so intricate and so carefully planned and such a feat, and could have just gone so wrong at any moment.”
The use of all those grass people made for a very different kind of staging — and the producers debated for some time on how to make the show visually unique for home viewers while still making it watchable for the fans in the stands at Levi’s Stadium.
“Probably more than any other show, this was choreographed to the camera,” Hamilton said. “With the grass people, it was quite enclosed. And so there were many debates about the camera versus the people in the audience in the stadium. For the stadium, they definitely had a restricted view during certain parts of the show. But I think that we ended up with a really good balance.”
The show’s cinematic look is by design, as the producers switched to cinema cameras for Super Bowl halftime a few years ago.
“For many years now, we have effectively used cinema cameras in a live television domain, which is really ambitious,” Hamilton said. “It’s very nerve-racking when you’re putting effectively Ferrari-esque technology to work in circumstances more attuned to using a Land Rover. These cameras are not really made to be used and run around a football field and put up in eight minutes. But they allow you to get an image that is significantly different to the imagery available on the game cameras. Until six or seven years ago, we would use the all-purpose sports cameras, which you can throw them off a cliff, and they’ll bounce back. Whereas these kind of digital cinema cameras, they have very specific lenses, and they work in a very specific way. It’s a complicated, challenging workflow, but a lot of people comment on how cinematic it looks. Other people just think it looks great.”
Signage that reads “The Only Thing More Powerful than Hate is Love” is displayed on the scoreboard
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Both Hamilton and Cuddeford felt the message of the halftime show was heard, and resonated with audiences.
“There’s a real sense of community and commitment to really delivering something that we all knew was going to be full of heart,” Hamilton said.
Cuddeford said: “People understood the message he wanted to convey. That Latino people felt loved, seen and celebrated, and that people felt joyful. It’s just an incredible thing that he’s managed to do, and that we’ve all managed to support him and to help deliver that into the world at this time is, honestly, a complete honor.”
Watch the full performance here:
