The producers of Bad Bunny’s triumphant Super Bowl LX halftime show had a problem. The NFL does not allow more than 25 carts to bring equipment onto the field at all-turf Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. For Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio and his creative team to pull off their incredible production plan, that meant sacrifices had to be made.
Fortunately, the solution to one of the show’s most stunning visuals, a pastisare (grasslands and other plants) that evokes the landscape of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico, was to make it real human. Production designers Bruce and Shelley Rogers and Julio Jimede recruited approximately 380 people to dress up in grass costumes to facilitate staging on and off.
“The solution was audacious in every way, putting people in the factory, getting them on and off the factory in time, and then putting all the sets and all the actors in place,” said creative director Harriet Cuddeford. “In addition to the factory personnel, the actual cast numbered over 330 people. It was just huge.”
Bad Bunny and the event’s producers and directors pulled off perhaps the most complex halftime extravaganza in Super Bowl history. The Benito Bowl, which featured superstar guests like Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, real-life weddings and real business owners (including Villas Tacos in Los Angeles), was planned with a lot of moving parts that could have gone wrong.
“There are so many variables in live television,” Cuddeford said. “The weather too. It was a real grass field, no roof. We had to plan for rain. There were a lot of things that could have caused problems. But it played out almost perfectly in front of us. We were all like, ‘Wow, it worked!’
“This was the greatest team effort I’ve ever worked on,” said director Hamish Hamilton, who has produced countless Super Bowl halftime shows, Oscars, Emmys and Grammys.
Here are some details Cadeford and Hamilton shared about this year’s Bad Bunny halftime show.
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Bad Bunny pulled off several stunts while singing. Much to the dismay of the producers, at one point the singer achieved high public voting rankings without taking any safety measures.
“He refused to wear a harness,” Hamilton said. “He was like, ‘I don’t need it.’ There are all sorts of legal implications to this, which doesn’t really concern me, but interestingly, when he decided not to wear a harness, we set up a camera on a pole and could look down at him as he climbed.”
Cadeford added: “With all the safety and equipment, of course he didn’t want to do it. He does his own stunts, and this guy learned it in about three minutes. He put the pole straight up. In rehearsal, we were all like, ‘Is he going to be OK?'” But he just went straight for it and took control of his vocals. It’s very agile. He could handle anything. ”
Speaking of stunts, it was one thing for Bad Bunny to fall off the roof of a pink casita, but it had to be timed perfectly to a pre-tape of Bunny doing the same thing that was seen by a family watching TV inside.
“The whole stunt of falling off the roof wasn’t that crazy because there was a trap door,” Cadeford said. “They literally just open it up and pull it out from under him. But we cut directly to the pre-tape, so it took very careful planning. In the pre-tape, there was a shot of him falling off the roof of the Super Bowl on TV, which meant the La Casita family was watching the Super Bowl live. But then he falls on the table. It’s basically two different pre-tapes: the one inside the house and the one on the field.” We put a cut between him falling off the roof and being able to kick open the front door. ”
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The couple who got married during the halftime show were from Ontario, California, and on a lark they sent Bad Bunny a wedding invitation.
The engaged couple ended up making 15 additional wedding announcements, Hamilton said. So she sent most of it to local businesses in hopes of getting free wedding favors. But what about the final invitation? “They were like, ‘Why don’t we send an invitation to Bad Bunny? There are a lot of people who send him wedding invitations, so why not send one,'” Hamilton said. “They got a call from Bad Bunny’s office and they thought, ‘Wow, maybe we can get an autographed photo.’ But then they got invited to a Zoom call, which they thought was a little weird.”
They learned of the plan on a Zoom call. Bad Bunny had asked her to get married at the Super Bowl. “We printed too many wedding invitations, which led to us getting married during Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl!” Hamilton said.
The couple planned to have their first dance to Bad Bunny’s “Baile Inolvidable.” “And they went from planning to play the song at their wedding to appearing at the Super Bowl with him live and singing it,” Cadeford said. “And there’s the added bonus of Lady Gaga being the wedding singer.”
Despite rumors on social media, Bad Bunny did not give his recently won Grammy Award to Liam, a boy from Minnesota who was imprisoned by ICE. But the moment is meant to convey a personal connection to the performer’s childhood.
“This kid is who we cast,” Cuddeford said. “But the story behind it was Benito’s idea. He grew up watching his idols win awards on TV. Now in his life, he’s on stage and accepting awards from his idols. He knew the Grammys were coming up and he wanted to win something. And obviously, he won Album of the Year this past weekend. And he really wanted to inspire the next generation.”
That’s why the boy at the Super Bowl wore clothes similar to what young Benito wears in the superstar’s famous childhood photo. “It’s a representation of his own youth, and I hope he inspires kids today,” she said.
Did Bad Bunny win back his Grammy?
“The truth is, I don’t know if he ever got it back,” Cuddeford said. “Knowing him, he might have left it to the kid, to be honest.”
Ricky Martin
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Bad Bunny personally selected Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin as guests. Martin is, of course, the childhood idol of Puerto Ricans. The song “Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii” sung by Martin resonated not only in Puerto Rico but also in Hawaii.
“It’s a very meaningful song, and it’s kind of a plea for Puerto Rico not to become Hawaii,” Cadeford said. “To make sure we preserve that culture and that identity. It was very powerful to have a Puerto Rican icon that he deeply loves and respects come and perform that song. During his stay, he had a lot of guest artists come and sing that song. He couldn’t coordinate to have Ricky sing it, so he was very excited to have Ricky sing it at the Super Bowl.”
The small business owners, vendors, and employees who appear as guests are all real people who were flown to the Super Bowl for the show.
Among them are Victor Villa, founder of Villa’s Tacos in Los Angeles, an authentic piragua (Puerto Rican shave ice dessert) seller, boxers Xander Zayas and Emiliano Vargas, an authentic manicurist, a barber, and more. The priest who married the couple in Ontario is also an actual ordained minister.
“This performance is a celebration of ordinary people and what it means to be human, to love, to have joy, and to truly appreciate each other,” Cadeford said. “This was to show how much he cares about his community, to honor ordinary people on the world’s biggest stage, especially people who are important in Latino culture. He’s a very real person, Benito, and that’s just being real and very real and very human.”
Yes, that was Maria Antonia Kaye, better known as Tonita, posing for a photo with Bad Bunny inside a recreation of the Caribbean Social Club, a famous Brooklyn landmark.
“We have faithfully recreated this iconic and culturally important Puerto Rican bar in Brooklyn,” Cadeford said. “And we flew Tonita out to be in the performance, and I saw him do shots with her in the part of the song where he sings about having shots with Tonita.”
There were few dangerous moments, such as a camera crane spinning out of control.
The crane used in the first scene around the casita lost its digital connection. “It literally started spinning like a hose out of control,” Hamilton said. “But maybe a second before the shot was needed, the camera locked into the perfect position again and we were cleared to shoot.”
And at another point, one of the low-angle cameras looking up at the casita has a bit of a wobble. “Essentially, everyone was racing for a shot, and the handheld cameraman taking the shot was then hit by the Chapman dolly that was trying to take the shot and collided with it. That’s the reason for the wobble. It’s split-second timing.”
Hamilton admitted that it was “terrifying” to watch the cameramen run around each other while filming. “There’s a moment in the ‘Nueva Yol’ performance where the camera literally arrives half a second before it starts shooting,” he said. “The crane came out and the camera ran half the way across the soccer field and literally ran into Benito!”
Cadeford added: “The camera work was insane, so intricate, so well planned, so amazing and could have gone wrong at any time.”
Using all these lawn people gave us a very different kind of staging. Producers discussed for some time how to make the show visually unique for home viewers while still being available to fans in the stands at Levi’s Stadium.
“Probably more than any other show, this was choreographed for the camera,” Hamilton said. “For the grass people, it was very closed off. So there was a lot of discussion about cameras and people in the stadium audience. With the stadium, it certainly limited visibility in certain parts of the show. But I think we ended up with a very good balance.”
The show’s cinematic look is by design, as producers switched to cinema cameras during Super Bowl halftime a few years ago.
“We’ve been using cinema cameras effectively in live television for many years, and this is really ambitious,” Hamilton said. “It’s very nerve-wracking to make Ferrari-like technology work effectively in an environment suitable for Land Rover use. These cameras weren’t made to actually drive around a football field and set up in eight minutes. But they can get very different images than you get with a gaming camera. Six or seven years ago, we were using all-purpose sports cameras that you could throw off a cliff and bounce back. This kind of digital cinema The camera has a very specific lens and works in a very specific way. It’s a complex and challenging workflow, but many people comment on how it looks and some think it’s simply amazing.”
A sign on the scoreboard reads, “The only thing stronger than hate is love.”
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Both Hamilton and Cadeford felt the message of the halftime show got across and resonated with the audience.
“There’s a real sense of community and a commitment to really delivering what we all knew by heart,” Hamilton said.
“People understood the message he wanted to send, which was that Latinx people felt loved, seen and celebrated, and people felt joy. What he was able to do was just incredible. It’s honestly a complete honor for all of us to be able to support him and help bring that to the world at this time,” Cadeford said.
Watch the entire performance here:
