Amy Adams declined raunchy ‘SNL’ song to protect young ‘Enchanted’ fans

The Lonely Island is reflecting on the time Amy Adams turned down a feature on one of their songs in order to look out for her younger fans. 

The comedy trio – composed of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer — explained that they’d pitched Adams the idea for a hilarious sexually explicit song when she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2008, but that she declined the offer because she didn’t want to scar fans of her film Enchanted. The Disney live-action/animated musical, which saw Adams play the bubbly princess-to-be Giselle, had been released four months prior to her appearance on the show. 

“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,” Samberg recalled of the lost sketch on a recent episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast. “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.”

He noted that they even played the beginning of the track and read some of its lyrics to Adams to gauge her potential interest. “She was like, ‘That’s really funny. I can’t do that,’” Samberg said. “‘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 and the Lonely Island collaborated on “Hero’s Song,” a digital short that saw Samberg play a Batman-inspired superhero who gets the snot beat out of him after he attempts to stop a criminal (Jason Sudeikis) from robbing Adams. When it came time to shoot the segment, Samberg said a fateful encounter made him realize that Adams had made the right call.

“Within 5 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,’” he said. “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?”

He continued, “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.”

Samberg’s co-host Seth Meyers also noted that there was a very real possibility that Enchanted fans could’ve ended up seeing the sketch as SNL is a show that some children are allowed to watch. 

“It also spoke to the Internet’s influence,” Samberg added. “Up until that point, YouTube and stuff — [it] was a year or two into it even existing and being a thing that people would be like, ‘I’m gonna watch everything with Amy Adams because I love Enchanted’ and accidentally finding that proposed song.”

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Adams later reprised her role as Giselle in the 2022 sequel Disenchanted, which saw her reunite with series costars Patrick Dempsey, Idina Menzel, and James Marsden. The film, which is set 15 years later, sees Giselle stir up some more trouble when she uses a magic wand to transform her family’s lives into the perfect fairytale, only to alter the entire world around them.

Listen to the Lonely Island talk about the could’ve-been-collab in the clip above.