Bad Bunny’s 13-minute Super Bowl performance took viewers on a vivid journey through Puerto Rico — its colorful neighborhoods, bustling streets and proud culture.
To pull it off, the 31-year-old superstar, who just a week earlier became the first Spanish-language artist to win record of the year at the Grammy Awards, enlisted more than 700 extras, including everyday people who were recruited to infuse the show with a bright streak of verisimilitude.
The result, as The New York Times’s Jon Caramanica wrote in a review of the performance, was a global show turned “intimate, personal and historically specific.” Here are some of the people who made it happen:
The Grammy Recipient
About nine minutes into Bad Bunny’s performance, the camera turned to a family watching the rapper accept a Grammy Award on an old television. Bad Bunny then appeared and handed a Grammy to the boy, whose striped shirt and tan shorts echoed an outfit the artist himself wears in a childhood photo. “Always believe in yourself,” Bad Bunny said to the child.
That boy, Lincoln Fox Ramadan, is 5 years old. His mother, Erika Ramadan, said in an interview that it had been a dizzying stretch for the family. “After so many days of rehearsal and being at the Super Bowl and all that emotion,” she said, “I think he just wanted to play.”
In late January, after the boy had been cast, the family drove to the Bay Area from their home in Costa Mesa, Calif., for rehearsals. “I was nervous, of course, excited and like, you know, proud,” she said of her son. She had worried that Lincoln would get bored or cranky. During down times, he did his schoolwork.
Asked by his mother if he wanted to talk to a reporter, Lincoln said shyly, “No.” With a little encouragement, he added that he was feeling “good” but was tired.
The Grass People
Andrew Athias, a 33-year-old digital marketer from Philadelphia, landed a spot as a clump of grass after responding to a casting call that required extras to be between 5-foot-7 and six feet and able to handle a 40- to 50-pound costume. Athias was one of roughly 380 bunches of grass, according to Variety. Together, they transformed the turf at Levi’s Stadium, where the game was played, into a Puerto Rican sugar cane field.
The costume was made of plastic “like you’d see at a fake plant store,” Athias said in an interview. “The grass blades were going into your mouth and your eyes and your nose, because, you know, you’re really in a grass bush.”
According to another clump of grass, Morgan Norvell of San Francisco, the turf came to smell like “earthy little portobello mushrooms.”
Athias said that although he had been paid California’s minimum wage, “I would have done this for free.”
Both he and Norvell left with a souvenir: their costume’s grassy arm pieces.
Norvell hopes to turn hers into a centerpiece in her home. It would make a “sneaky, cheeky, little Super Bowl moment,” she said.
The Bar Owner
Maria Antonia Cay, known as Toñita, runs one of the last Puerto Rican social clubs in New York. Bad Bunny has long been a patron. During Sunday’s performance, Toñita, beaming from inside a replica of her storefront constructed on the field, served Bad Bunny what appeared to be a shot of liquor in a small red plastic cup. He knocked it back.
Giovanni Gonzalez, Cay’s manager, told The Times that Cay had been asked to join the halftime show in mid-December. She hesitated, in part because she had never been to California and the flight was long.
“I was emotional, but I was not nervous,” Cay said in Spanish. “The show was marvelous and exceptional. We are proud of having participated in such a huge moment.”
The Priest
For Antonio Reyes, a campus pastor at Project Church South Sacramento, the gravity that he had officiated a wedding in Spanish on a Super Bowl field, as 70,000 fans (and millions more through their screens) looked on, did not settle in until he later signed the paper work.
“I was very emotional,” he told the ABC affiliate in Sacramento. “And not just because of the stadium. But to me it was because of the moment — what it represented to our Latino community.”
Reyes, who spent a week rehearsing his part of the show, said it was clear that Bad Bunny wanted to demonstrate unity.
“That this country is made by all of us,” he said. “You know, it doesn’t matter your race, your ethnicity. We all made this country.”
The Taquero
In the opening segment of his performance, Bad Bunny grabs a Puerto Rican shaved ice dessert known as a piragua from one vendor and hands it to another: Victor Villa, the owner of Villa’s Tacos, a beloved taco spot in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Villa told NBC Los Angeles that when he got a call about appearing in the show, he wondered: “They want me to cook? Will they make me do a skit?”
What Bad Bunny wanted, as Villa wrote on social media after the show, was something a bit larger: to represent “all the taqueros of the world.”
Villa wrote that he had sold his first taco nearly a decade ago from the front yard of his grandmother’s house in Highland Park. He thanked Bad Bunny for “giving me an opportunity to represent my people, my culture, my family & my business.”
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
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