Amy Adams was the hero during one particular Saturday Night Live episode.
While speaking on a recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers rewatch podcast, Andy Samberg — one-third of the trio that also includes Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — recalled a behind-the-scenes moment where the Nightbitch actress declined to film a short that might have been upsetting to some young fans of Enchanted.
“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,” he explained. “I know that’s kind of sh—y to not say what the premise was, but 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.”
While the six-time Oscar nominee was more than game conceptually speaking, she had to draw a line.
“We played the beginning of it for her and read a bunch of the lyrics, and she thought it was very funny, and she was so nice as always — we love Amy, she’s a genius,” Samberg said, “and 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.’”
Instead, Adams went on to collaborate with the sketch comedy troupe on “Hero Song” during her hosting debut on a March 2008 episode of the NBC late-night show. That song featured then-cast member Jason Sudeikis as a robber who mugs passerby Adams and who then infringes upon Samberg’s spoof of The Dark Knight by punching him repeatedly.
“When we went out to shoot ‘Hero Song,’ 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,’” Samberg recalled. “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? Of 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.”