The idea of a concert special didn’t exactly light up Ed Sheeran’s mind.
“Every time it was pitched to me, I just wasn’t excited,” says the English singer and songwriter who’s spent the last decade or so among the world’s top touring acts. “‘We could do this theater and this town and this…’ — it was like, ‘I’ve seen that before.’”
But then Sheeran got a call from Ben Winston, the Emmy-winning producer and director known for his role overseeing the Grammy Awards and as a creator of James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” series.
Actually, it was an email, Winston points out. “You can’t call Ed because he doesn’t have a phone,” he says. “You have to email him and hope he FaceTimes you back from his iPad.”
Winston’s pitch earlier this year was simple but intriguing: What if they took the one-shot approach that helped make Netflix’s “Adolescence” such a sensation and used it to film a performance by Sheeran — not simply onstage but as he goes on a journey somewhere? And instead of getting a director “kind of like the guy who shot ‘Adolescence,’” as Winston recalls putting it, “Why don’t we just ask the guy who shot ‘Adolescence’?”
Sheeran liked the idea; so did Philip Barantini, who won two Emmys in September for directing that acclaimed miniseries about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a female classmate. (Winston got Barantini’s number from Corden and hit him cold on WhatsApp.)
Now Netflix has just released “One Shot with Ed Sheeran,” in which a camera trails the 34-year-old singer as he roams New York City, acoustic guitar in hand, between soundcheck and a gig at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The hourlong result, which true to its title presents the roving performance in a single unbroken shot with no edits, can of course be seen as a piece of high-toned promo ahead of next month’s launch of a world tour behind Sheeran’s latest album, “Play.”
But doing the special as a so-called oner — and with a limited number of chances to get it right — also posed an invigorating creative challenge for a performer who’s been entertaining crowds since he was 15.
“Because I do the same thing every weekend, just in a different place, I don’t really feel the nerves anymore,” Sheeran says of his live show, which typically features him alone onstage (even in football stadiums) with only a guitar and a looping station for accompaniment. “Whereas with this, I really felt the pressure.”
Winston says the team behind “One Shot” chose New York as the setting “because we felt like every corner of New York feels like a movie set.” In the show, Sheeran plays his hits as he rides in a taxi, walks the High Line, serenades a couple mid-proposal and pops unannounced into a rooftop birthday party; he also clambers up to the top of a double-decker bus and joins Camila Cabello in an SUV in the middle of traffic for a duet on his song “Photograph.”
“We probably could have picked a different city that was quieter and blocked off the roads and did it perfectly,” Sheeran says. “But the chaos of it, I think, is what makes it interesting.”
Sheeran did just three takes: a dress rehearsal on a Sunday afternoon the filmmakers shot “in case it went great,” says Winston — “It didn’t,” he adds — then two performances on a Monday sandwiched between the morning and evening rush hours. Three camera operators passed a lightweight Ronin 4D rig among themselves as the singer moved from set piece to set piece, and not always as smoothly as they’d hoped.
One of the guys proposing to his partner took about two minutes to pop the question, according to Sheeran. “It was literally like he was on his own reality show,” says Barantini. One of the women celebrating her birthday, meanwhile, “just hopped onstage and started twerking,” Sheeran recalls. “For the whole song.” (Alas, she’s not in the take they used.)
“I was in the van watching the monitors, going, ‘This is cool,’” Barantini says. “Then it got to the point I was like, ‘This is not cool anymore. Can we please get her down?’” The producers used a casting director to find these folks but Sheeran says none of them knew they’d be encountering him as they went about their business in Manhattan.
For Winston, “One Shot” is in keeping with his determination to “try and see where music goes in different places,” he says. He compares the project to the time he had Adele sing outdoors at the Griffith Observatory for a CBS special in 2021 and the time he put Bruno Mars on the marquee of the Apollo Theater for a different CBS special in 2017.
“Even in the Olympic handover,” he adds of the concert he oversaw last year, “rather than doing it in the Paris stadium, we were like, ‘Hold on — wouldn’t it be cool if you had Dre, Snoop, Billie Eilish and the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the beach in L.A.?’” (Winston will serve as executive producer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2028 Summer Games.)
Barantini singles out 2014’s “Birdman,” which Alejandro G. Iñárritu designed to resemble one continuous take, as a visual inspiration for the Sheeran special; the singer himself mentions the famous scene from “Goodfellas” where Martin Scorsese’s camera follows Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco into the Copacabana nightclub.
Yet everyone involved with “One Shot” is eager to emphasize that, unlike those movies, their show wasn’t scripted.
“It’s a lot more honest than you might think,” Winston says.
Sheeran recalls asking Cabello on camera as he’s getting out of her car whether she’d like to join him and his family that night for spaghetti Bolognese.
“That was the only time you said that,” Barantini tells the singer, “and I remember saying to you afterwards, ‘That was really good — I like the improv.’” He laughs. “And Ed was like, ‘No, but she is coming to mine tonight.’”
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