Some of the biggest stars to emerge from this year's Super Bowl halftime show never even showed their faces on camera. They were the ones who dressed as bunches of grass to transform a football stadium into the sugarcane fields of Puerto Rico.
Bad Bunny, fresh off of three wins at the Grammy Awards just a week before the Super Bowl, headlined a symbolism-laden performance Sunday in Santa Clara, California, that paid homage to his homeland.
Hidden inside the sugarcane grass beside him were humans hired to stand there in costume. The realization that real people were cast to play hundreds of bushes at the Super Bowl turned the inconspicuous performers into a social media sensation overnight.
After the show, dozens of people online revealed to friends and family members that they, indeed, performed at the Super Bowl — even if their identities weren’t discernible.
José Villanueva, a Bad Bunny superfan, was among the hundreds of performers who were paid $18.70 an hour to perform as a bunch of grass. He said the experience felt “too good to be true.”
“You get a view if you’re in the stands, if you pay to watch a Super Bowl. You get another view if you’re watching through a screen,” Villanueva said. “But being on the field is something totally different. I wanted to cry, but I was holding in the tears.”
According to the casting call by the live events staffing agency Backlit, the role was “not a dancing role,” but successful applicants would be “performing structured movements and blocking as part of the larger production.” A tentative schedule listed eight shifts over two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, including one final 14-hour shift days before the game.
Though the listing didn’t specify what exactly the role entailed, it hinted that it would involve “exposure to costume materials that may include natural fibers.” It also indicated a preference for those with experience in marching, and it required applicants to be able to wear and move in full-body costumes weighing up to 40 pounds.
Villanueva said that when he first met the rest of the field cast, they all began speculating about what exactly they were going to be.
“My theory was that we were gonna be sharks. The rest of the cast was like, ‘No, we’re gonna be frogs,’” he said. “And then we just see this bush moving, and we’re like, ‘What?’ And they go, ‘Nah, you guys are gonna be trees.’”
Because of where he was placed on the field, Villanueva said, he had to practice wearing the heavy costume for extra time because his role required more movement than many of the other bushes. He said that on the first day, it felt like “50 to 60 pounds for like four hours straight on your shoulder.”
“That was killing me. It was bad,” Villanueva said. “I kid you not, 20% of the people, they quit, they said they didn’t want to do it. It was so heavy that they had people crying. They had people going through panic attacks. And a lot of people left.”
But he said the crew quickly absorbed feedback from the cast and managed to reduce the weight of the costumes by the second or third practice.
Jay Z's entertainment company, Roc Nation, which produces the Super Bowl halftime show, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Aside from the bulk, Villanueva said, he could see only straight ahead, and performers would frequently bump into one another during practices because of the low visibility. They also wore safety goggles to prevent any unruly blades of grass from poking them in the eyes.
And despite their excitement, he said, performers had to sign nondisclosure agreements to keep their Super Bowl involvement quiet until the day of.
So, immediately after the show, Villanueva and his fellow performers began posting photos of themselves in costume, sharing photos and screenshots of the halftime show while pointing out which bushes they were in. Others vlogged their experiences.
One performer, Andrew Athias, told Business Insider that he flew from the other side of the country, paying his expenses out of pocket, to be a bush at the Super Bowl.
“My part was actually really easy,” Athias said. “They just told me where to stand, and they said: ‘Don’t move. Stand here and be one with the grass.’”
During the halftime show, Bad Bunny weaved through the sugarcane field to tell a distinctly Puerto Rican story. The set included a piraguas (snow cone) cart, a boxing match, people playing dominoes and others dancing.
Lady Gaga performed a salsa version of “Die With a Smile,” Ricky Martin sang Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii,” and a handful of other celebrities and influencers made brief cameos.
Bad Bunny, the first Spanish-language Latin solo artist to headline the Super Bowl, also included everything from symbolism around recurrent power outages in Puerto Rico to a real wedding that happened onstage mid-show.
“I was singing every single song. And my friend next to me, a really good friend of mine now, Mike, he was like: ‘Dude, I could barely listen to Benito [Bad Bunny]. You were louder,’” Villanueva said. “I’m like: ‘Dude, I’m a big fan. What can I tell you?’”
