More than 15 years, one of Beyoncé‘s catchiest songs — and the Saturday Night Live sketch it inspired — still have a hold on the hive.
Justin Timberlake recently revealed how he convinced the 32x Grammy winner to parody her 2008 music video for ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’ on the NBC sketch comedy show with himself, Andy Samberg and Bobby Moynihan as unitard-clad dancers.
“[Samberg] 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,” recalled Timberlake in the documentary Ladies & Gentleman… 50 Years of SNL Music, now streaming on Peacock. “I was like ‘full leotard’? And he’s like, ‘yeah.’ I was like, ‘This is too funny. We have to do this.’”
Despite their similar ’90s pop music backgrounds, Timberlake had his work cut out for him in convincing the Destiny’s Child alum.
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“She was very polite about it, but she was very hesitant. And when I say hesitant, I mean like, she was not having it,” he said. “I’m like: Does she know how funny this is gonna be? How beloved this whole moment will be?”
Timberlake recounted, “I put the leotard and the heels and the hose on and everything, and put a robe on. I walked and knocked on her door, I threw the robe down and put my hands on my hips and she was like, ‘No you didn’t!’”
Knowles made waves with the single from her third solo album I Am… Sasha Fierce, winning the Grammy for Song of the Year and an MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year.
Timberlake, Samberg, Moynihan and host Paul Rudd hilariously paid tribute to the hit song in the sketch, in which Rudd is Bey’s video director, assuring her that he “hand-picked” the dancers himself, before the hilarious trio is revealed. Comedy ensues as they give their own take on the minimalist black-and-white video.