Amy Adams has revealed she turned down a sketch idea from Andy Samberg during her 2008 Saturday Night Live hosting stint, and her reason for doing so says a great deal about the responsibility she felt towards her youngest fans.
Speaking on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Adams explained that Samberg had pitched her a skit involving a couple in a park where the man had been bitten by a spider and, as a dying wish, requested something from his partner that Adams described as “the most graphic thing” she could imagine.
She kept the punchline to herself but gave enough of the setup to make the picture clear.
“I was so keenly aware of all the young girls that were watching Enchanted,” she said.
“And I didn’t want to be the princess singing about that particular act, you know?”
The timing made her thinking entirely understandable.
Adams was hosting SNL just months after Enchanted had become a hit with families and children, and the last thing she wanted was to undermine that with content her young audience might stumble across.
As she told Samberg at the time, according to his own retelling on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, she found the sketch “really funny” but felt she simply couldn’t do it
. “Little girls are so obsessed with Enchanted right now they will find this and it will be scarring for them,” she told him.
Samberg admitted he hadn’t quite understood where she was coming from, until a moment during filming that changed his mind entirely.
While shooting the Hero Song short for the same episode, a mother and young daughter approached Adams on the street.
The look on the little girl’s face when she saw the actress was enough.
“Oh, she was so right,” Samberg recalled thinking.
“It’s not something I even ever thought about in our line of work, you know what I mean? 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.”
Meyers confirmed that Samberg had previously praised Adams publicly for standing her ground, both for her own image and for the children who looked up to her.
