Amy Adams is opening up about why she rejected a “graphic” sketch idea while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2008.
The Oscar-nominated actress hosted the late night NBC show a few months after her family-friendly fairytale comedy Enchanted, also starring James Marsden, hit theaters. So when SNL castmember Andy Samberg pitched her the skit, she chose to turn it down to protect her young fans.
“I’ll give you the gist without telling you the punchline,” Adams said of the sketch during a recent appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers. “It was this couple [and] he got bit by a spider in the park, and she’s like, ‘Honey, I love you so much, and now that you’re dying, is there any last wish?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes, I never got a chance to…’ And then said what could only be described as the most graphic thing that he wanted to do with me.”
Host Seth Meyers told the Cape Fear actress that Samberg had previously praised her for speaking up for herself and her image, as well as considering her young fans.
“I was so keenly aware of all the young girls that were watching Enchanted,” Adams explained. “And I didn’t want to be the princess singing about that particular act, you know?”
Last year, on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Samberg shared that the skit in question would have featured a “very dirty” duet. And though he said Adams thought it was “really funny,” she nicely explained that she “can’t do that. Little girls are so obsessed with Enchanted right now they will find this and it will be scarring for them.”
Not long after, when they went to film the “Hero Song” short for that SNL episode, Samberg was able to fully understand where Adams was coming from.
“Within five 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,’” the Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor recounted. “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.”
