Justin Timberlake Recalls Pitching Beyoncé on 'Single Ladies' Male Dancer 'SNL' Sketch
A big part of the job at Saturday Night Live in the week leading up to showtime is convincing that week’s host or musical guest to appear in sketches that sometimes sound bizarre at best, or potentially disastrous at worst. That was the dilemma frequent SNL guest Justin Timberlake found himself in November 2008 when cast member Andy Samberg hit him up to see if he was in town to hop in on a bit that castmate Bobby Moynihan had cooked up.
“He said Bobby Moynihan has this great idea for a sketch about you, me, and him being Beyoncé’s background dancers that never made the cut,” Timberlake explained in the three-hour doc Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music, which aired on NBC on Monday night (Jan. 27). “I was like ‘full leotard’? And he’s like, ‘yeah.’ I was like, ‘This is too funny. We have to do this.’”
Here’s the thing: the three guys were totally down, but convincing Queen Bey to get super silly with them was going to be another matter entirely. In the exhaustive look at the show’s musical history co-directed by Oscar-winning Roots drummer Questlove, current SNL star Bowen Yang explained that “when you pitch a sketch that the musical guest is involved in potentially it can always go wrong.”
And, according to JT, at first Beyoncé was not into it. At all.
“He said Bobby Moynihan has this great idea for a sketch about you, me, and him being Beyoncé’s background dancers that never made the cut,” Timberlake explained in the three-hour doc Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music, which aired on NBC on Monday night (Jan. 27). “I was like ‘full leotard’? And he’s like, ‘yeah.’ I was like, ‘This is too funny. We have to do this.’”
Here’s the thing: the three guys were totally down, but convincing Queen Bey to get super silly with them was going to be another matter entirely. In the exhaustive look at the show’s musical history co-directed by Oscar-winning Roots drummer Questlove, current SNL star Bowen Yang explained that “when you pitch a sketch that the musical guest is involved in potentially it can always go wrong.”
And, according to JT, at first Beyoncé was not into it. At all.