‘Popstar’: Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island on Their Boy Band Movie

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hild prodigy, co-founder of the boy band Style Boyz, multiplatinum solo artist, pitchman for White Butt Jeans, record-holder for the most catchphrases dropped in a single song — Conner Friel, a.k.a. Conner4Real, is all of these things, and more. In fact, the faux pop star of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is such a great representation of a modern musical megastar that if he weren’t played by Andy Samberg, you might not realize he’s fictional.

Following the rise, fall, and rebound of a character that’s a little bit Bieber, a little bit Timberlake, a little bit Macklemore, and a whole lotta idiocy, the mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, released June 3, 2016, is the first feature film from the Lonely Island — the holy trinity of SNL writers and lifelong comedy collaborators Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer. An affectionate ribbing of the then-growing trend of artist-sanctioned profiles known as “popumentaries,” it does for 21st-century chart-toppers what This Is Spinal Tap did for middle-aged metal bands. And while it isn’t the Lonely Island’s biggest hit, a decade later it’s a bona fide cult classic. Sing a few bars of “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)” or say “Thirty Seconds to Mars is the name of a band, it is not a fact!” in a crowded room, and chances are half the folks there will crack up. (The ones worth talking to, in any case.)

In honor of the film’s 10th anniversary, we reached out to the Lonely Island and several of their collaborators on the movie to talk about the experience of making it, their favorite songs and jokes, and why a film about pop idols in the mid-2010s still holds up today. (We’ve also included a few choices quotes from our 2016 interview with the trio right before the film’s release.) This is the oral history of Popstar. Conner4Real 4Eva.

Part 1: The Birth of Conner

By the beginning of 2014, childhood friends Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer had been making shorts under the name “the Lonely Island” — the handle comes from a nickname they’d given their shared L.A. apartment — for well over a decade. They had become breakout stars on SNL thanks to their digital shorts, had put out three albums of their songs (2009’s “Incredibad,” 2011’s “Turtleneck & Chain,” and 2013’s “The Wack Album”), and had released the comedy “Hot Rod.” The less-than-stellar reception of that 2007 film slowed down the Island’s big-screen career, and all three members were balancing solo projects when an opportunity to take another shot at making a movie came their way.

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Akiva Schaffer (co-director, co-writer, Lawrence “Kid Brain” Dunn): We rewrote Hot Rod, but we didn’t get a screen credit — Pam Brady had written it for Will Ferrell back when we were still assistants in L.A., with no prospects whatsoever. When we got SNL, Lorne [Michaels] and Paramount dug it up and went, “Oh, we always like this idea, and there’s a lot of good stuff in this script. Would you guys want to take it over and rewrite it for Andy?” So a lot of it’s ours.

Judd Apatow (producer): I mean, they’d done Hot Rod, but it wasn’t like the three of them doing their, you know, Monty Python-type film.

Andy Samberg (co-writer, Conner4Real): We had talked about wanting to make another movie that was like a pure Lonely Island movie. And we had two ideas. One of them was doing a Curb Your Enthusiasm-style mockumentary about the Lonely Island with us playing ourselves, but writing new songs for it and weaving that into a story. And the other one was doing a fake band and doing a popumentary, which were really popular at the time.

Apatow: My managers also represented them, even before they got Saturday Night Live. So I was aware of them, but hadn’t met them before they started on the show. Very early on, during their tenure there, we had a meeting, and I said, “You guys should start writing the Lonely Island movie now, so by the time people become really familiar with you, you have it ready to go. Because it takes a long time to write a great one.”

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Samberg: We already knew Judd, and he had curated this Vanity Fair comedy issue and included us in it, which was really nice. And in the magazine he wrote, “If they ever want to make a movie, I’ll produce it.” We were like, did he mean that? Akiva said, “I think I’m gonna have a general meeting with Judd.”

Schaffer: It might have even been Judd that brought up the mockumentary format first.

Apatow: I don’t remember who specifically pitched the idea. But from the from the beginning, they were interested in doing something that would take place in the world of music. And there were all of these documentaries, like the Justin Bieber one. What was it called? Like, Don’t Stop Believing, or something like that? [Editor’s note: It’s called Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.] There was the One Direction documentary, the Katy Perry documentary… You’d watch them and realize that they were essentially, you know, puff pieces. It was marketing. It wasn’t like the Metallica documentary where they go to therapy [Some Kind of Monster].

So the original thought was, what if they started making one of those marketing pieces for an artist, and everything went wrong in his career? You would use the exact same style and format while disaster happened — which I guess you could say is what happened with the Metallica documentary. Basically, what I’m saying is it’s a parody of the Metallica documentary. [Laughs.]

Schaffer: We would not have settled on an idea on our own, probably.

Samberg: Because it’s hard for us pull the trigger on writing a whole movie cold without some plan for it. Judd said [to Akiva], “Well, if you want to do the second idea, the popumentary one, I’ll make that right now. I have a deal at Universal. Let’s just do it.” Akiva was like, “Oh, shit. OK, I’ll talk to the guys.” So he came back and told us, and we were like, “Yeah, obviously, that’s amazing.”

Schaffer: I was fan of popumentaries. But there is always something so polished about them. They’re not exposés, because you can’t make [a popumentary] from the outside; with those kind of big-budget projects, you’re doing it with the permission of the artist and with the artist themselves. So they are 90-minute advertisements on some level for whoever they’re about. They are so serious, and obviously, they are ripe for parody in that way.

But they’re also kinda awesome. The one I can point to that we had watched of our own volition, before we even were going to make one, was the Morgan Spurlock doc on One Direction [This Is Us]. I think part of the reason we watched it was that part of it was in 3-D, I believe, and we were just like, “That’s crazy. Let’s go see what the fuss is.” And it did exactly what it was supposed to do. “Oh, they’re talented, but they’re nice, and they all have their own personalities.” It makes you love those boys.

Apatow: Popumentaries were a great starting point. They could layer in behind-the-scenes stuff, with music videos and old footage. And they always have those videos that show artists goofing around backstage at the arena on scooters or something.

Schaffer: It was summer, and we knew Andy was going to go back to shoot Brooklyn Nine-Nine. So we had to do the thing we always do when we’re going to make a project together, which is like, “Hey, if we’re all going to clear our schedules of individual careers, we have to make a pact to each other to actually do this.” If, you know, Scorsese calls Andy and it’s a week or two, great. But if it’s a huge thing that’s going to disrupt it, you can’t have the other guys disrupt their whole lives, and then have one of us bail on the other.

Apatow: I had just been through that process with Kristen Wiig and Bridesmaids, and it took about four years for her and [co-writer] Annie Mumolo to get the script together, because she was so busy working on Saturday Night Live that she only could work during breaks in the summer. It was going to be a gigantic commitment for the Lonely Island guys, because it required them not working anywhere else during their summer break and focus on writing the script. Then the next summer, they shot the movie.

Part 2: “High on His Own Supply”

The trio didn’t have a finalized deal yet. But they had a subject and Apatow in their corner, so they began writing with the idea that they’d finally be able to make a proper Lonely Island movie.

Jorma Taccone (co-writer, co-director, Kid Contact): I’m writing on the East Coast. Those guys are writing on the West Coast.

Schaffer: Jorm would come out to L.A., and we would treat it like a nine-to-five or a 10-to-six, where we clear our schedules Monday through Friday, like the movie was already greenlit. Judd was like, “I’ll get a deal going for you guys.” From our perspective, we’re like, “OK, we are making this next summer, so we better get to work.” We just acted as if it was a long SNL episode where we had a deadline.

Samberg: Akiva and I pretty much started writing songs immediately, just to test out ideas and find the character. I think we had written, like, three or four songs before we even had the story broken. Because we just knew that part of it was going to be a full original album.

I think one of the first ones we wrote is a song called “I’m a Weirdo,” which was not one of the big ones. But we had a lot of fun writing it and finding the tone of Conner and how he was, like, kind of talented, but also kind of just… annoying. [Laughs.] He’s high on his own supply and drinking the Kool-Aid, he has sycophants all around him. We had observed a lot of pop-star culture working at SNL, and going into it, we were like, it’s not going to work if it’s just like an antihero you hate. You want to sympathize with him.

Schaffer: Part of what we liked about the mockumentary idea, besides Judd wanting to do it, was that if we come up with a funny song, we don’t have to figure out exactly why it fits in the movie specifically. Like, if it was a musical and you wrote the song “Ibiza,” you’re like, “Oh, shit, the plot better take him to Ibiza, or else why is he singing about Ibiza?” If it’s something like The Little Mermaid, you gotta work it in, in a really tangible way. But with this, we can just write a stupid song about anything and go, “What’s the dumbest, craziest thing that this character would sing about?” And then we could figure out, hopefully, where it fits in the movie.

Taccone: We all love the man-falling-apart-due-to-hubris story — I’m obsessed with it, always. This is a real Lonely Island thing, too, because we tend to work the self-deprecation joke. From the jump, we know that “OK — this is the Conner album that failed. Let’s lean into the bad choices behind that.” Plus his solo debut is called Thriller, Also, which… [laughs]. I was trying to get us to name one of our albums Thriller, Also, by the way. That’s a joke that I’ve been pushing on people forever. But it’s so immediately fun to then write from the perspective of a guy who does not get it, who’s so beyond being able to relate to the common man anymore.

I love flawed characters that kind of get their comeuppance, and then, in a very stupid way, realize what they need. He’s got his head blown to such a crazy proportion that he’s forgotten his friends, and then he just sort of needs to realize that friends are good.

Samberg: We broke a bunch of different stories that it could be. And Judd, I believe, was the one that was like, “Oh, it should really just be about the friendship. What I like about that is it’s also kind of your story. And I think you’ll find a lot of truth in that, and that will be fun for you guys all to play together.”

Apatow: I’m always interested in stories about friendship and how fame screws everything up. So they came up with a really great story about what took the band apart.

Samberg: We tend to listen to him because he’s smart. [Laughs.]

Part 3: The Soundtrack 4Real

It was always part of the plan that an official Lonely Island movie would be filled with a lot of original Lonely Island songs. So, along with music supervisors Randall Poster and George Drakoulias, the trio began fleshing out their demos and recording songs for Conner and his tour mate (and eventual rival), Hunter the Hungry.

Samberg: It was definitely our hope and our intention to make those songs sound as much like the real thing as possible. And, you know, some of the people who helped us out, like Greg Kurstin [a producer who’s worked with Adele and the Jonas Brothers] — they make the biggest pop music in the world. So we were aiming as high as we possibly could in terms of what we were doing sonically and production-wise. It was a studio movie, and we wanted it to really, forgive the pun, pop. [Pauses.] OK, actually don’t forgive me for that pun. Hold that over me for all eternity, please.

George Drakoulias (music supervisor): Before shooting started, we looked at [the script] and said, “OK, here’s where the song spots are — how many do we want, what’s happening in the story at this point,” etc. We’d go out to the publishers, or certain people that we knew had these kind of writers in their stable, and they’d send the 16 bars or whatever. If there’s something they like, we continue on from there and make it a full song.

Taccone: I remember we got fucking beats from No ID once, and I was like, “Oh, my God!” I was so fucking geeked, like, “Dude, this was Kanye’s mentor. Like, holy shit!”

Drakoulias: The idea was always to treat it seriously and not a joke. The songs have jokes but they’re not “joke songs,” you know what I mean?

Adam Levine (Maroon 5 singer, hologram poster boy): Comedy songs have to be good at their core, I think, to be really impactful. It’s like someone like Jack Black, who’s a brilliant fucking singer, but also really funny. The same thing goes for these guys. They probably won’t say that about themselves, so I’ll say it: These were amazingly good, well-put-together, well-produced, well-written songs that were funny.

Drakoulias: They’re real writers and real beat-makers, and we’d also try to cull from the best of who was doing that kind of music at the time. I’d bring in stuff, and they’d tell me, “This is good for Conner, this is good for Hunter.”

Schaffer [from 2016]: A lot of times we’ll have something like a Notes document or a Google doc, where it’s just bullet points of song ideas. Sometimes it’ll be a paragraph, if one idea kind of went somewhere. Sometimes it’s just a few words. But those will just get added to all the time, regardless of even having a movie to write or an album to write, just so that we don’t forget ideas. “Finest Girl (Bin Laden Song)” specifically had that trajectory.

This was, of course, the song with the “Fuck Bin Laden” chorus, in which Conner sings about a lover’s request to have sex with her in the same dedicated, intense manner that SEAL Team 6 pulled off the operation that took out the mastermind behind 9/11. Not surprisingly, it took a few tries to nail the tone of the joke.

Taccone [from 2016]: I think [Andy and Akiva] had written more or less everything up to the second chorus. Then I came out to L.A., and we kept trying to build on it.

Samberg [from 2016]: It was one of the few times that’s ever happened, where we started writing a song and didn’t think it was working, but then didn’t bail on the idea and found a different beat for it.

Schaffer [from 2016]: [Originally] it had a whole different melody, and a whole different way of presenting the joke. It was different in a way that would literally be the bad version of the same song. Like, the difference between, like, what we do and what somebody who’s not as good at what we do does what we do. We listened to it and said—

Samberg [from 2016]: “We can never play this for anybody. Ever.”

Schaffer [from 2016]: I can’t even remember what the original melody was, because the final version is so burned into my brain; I’d have to dig up some old Pro Tools files. 

But people always ask, like, “Where’s the line?” How do you know if you don’t cross it? You never really know. But with that one, there was something about it where we were like, “This is crossing the line — but it shouldn’t be, because we know there’s something here…” We know the way to thread the needle usually, but we got it wrong that time.

Taccone [from 2016]: That song’s threading many different needles simultaneously.

Schaffer [from 2016]: And then, for whatever reason, we all believed in that one enough, or it was making us laugh enough, that we finally came to another version, using a different track from our producer. And then it came out a whole different way, and snapped together really, really quickly once we had that.

Drakoulias: I’m particularly fond of the “Fuck Bin Laden” song and I think it’s just like… [sings:] “This girl requested intercourse to bring her to climax with the clinical efficiency…” [Laughs.] It still makes me laugh. That little B section is where Andy sounds just like Bieber — he just nails it.

“Equal Rights,” Conner’s plea for tolerance, was a riff on a 2012 Macklemore and Ryan Lewis song, “Same Love,” that was adopted by the LGBTQ movement in the fight to legalize same-sex marriage. Pink featured on the parody.

Apatow: “Equal Rights” just really makes me laugh. I guess it was based on a Macklemore-type vibe?

Samberg: “Equal Rights” was interesting. We had had the premise for a while. We had asked comedy friends of ours to send us ideas for songs. Because we were like, “We’re gonna need a lot of songs for this — and we want to do it fast.” And a few of our friends had even pitched a similar idea to “Equal Rights,” and we had kind of been ducking it.

But in terms of making songs, generally speaking, it just takes the first few lines for us to be like, “Oh, I see how it would work!” And that was one of them, where we just started doing the first few lines of it, and, like, continually hitting the refrain of, “I’m not gay, I’m not gay” — the dissonance of the message versus what’s actually being said just really made us giggle.

Drakoulias: When we were going to shoot with Pink, we were talking to her management, and they said, “She’ll only do it, but only if she’s on a unicorn with a rainbow.” We’re all laughing, ha-ha-ha. And we wound up getting her the unicorn. She showed up to set, and was like “Hey, you guys, how’s it…” And then she sees this unicorn and we’re like, “This is what you guys asked for! We’re gonna deliver! So here’s your music, here’s your unicorn, here’s your rainbow.”

Samberg: I mean, what Macklemore did with “Same Love” was incredible and beautiful — that performance he did where all of the couples got married was, like, truly fantastic and moving. Just him putting it out there, forcing a world which doesn’t want to see that to accept that that’s real love… I have a lot of respect for that.

But obviously, at that moment in time, it was very much the beginning of the virtue-signaling stuff, where you’re like, “Cool… but do you really ride for it? Do you really mean it? Do you really know what you’re saying here?” And again, it’s like a micro-complaint sort of nested inside of a much bigger, much more important issue. Yet it was also undeniably funny to us.

Apatow: “Equal Rights” was one of the songs they had during the writing process, and at one point it disappeared, because they decided not to do it. And if there’s just one small contribution I made to the film, it’s that I told them that was the best of all the songs. Thank God it resurfaced, because it is just them at their very best.

Several other tracks from the film featured major pop stars. Michael Bolton and Justin Timberlake appear on “Incredible Thoughts,” the Style Boyz’ play on Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles.” Adam Levine shows up on “Humble,” Conner’s song in which he brags about being humble. And in a major coup, they locked Seal for a cameo where he performs at Conner’s elaborate wedding proposal to girlfriend Ashley, and is mauled by wolves who break out of their cages as he sings.

Taccone [from 2016]: Max Martin actually recorded Justin [Timberlake’s] lyrics on “Incredible Thoughts,” and that was just because they were recording together. That was the only time we could get him; we were basically infiltrating their session. And then Greg Kurstin did three tracks. He, like, put his touch on three or four of the songs — “Incredible Thoughts,” the Bin Laden song, and “Humble.”

Levine: I had done the “Iran So Far Away” short [on SNL] — that was in 2007, the second time Maroon 5 was on the show. We were literally on a laptop, all of us in an office after hours, putting it together, layering harmonies on it. I mean, SNL has such a crazy way that they operate, and that was so fun. That first experience with them was such a blast. So I immediately said yes when they asked me to be on the song. I’ll sing the hooks on all the Lonely Island material for the rest of eternity.

Taccone [from 2016]: Seal was our first choice to sing the song for the wedding scene — he’s actually singing a version of [Conner’s anti-painting single] “Mona Lisa,” which you can hear better on the soundtrack. From the get go, it always had to be Seal. Andy called him and, like, he was surprisingly game. Sometimes I feel like, with English people and their sense of humor, we have a better chance of getting them to do things that are slightly more outrageous. But for whatever reason, he said yes. Maybe it’s just that Seal loves wolves and doesn’t mind being attacked by them.

But one, he was willing to do the joke about that being the origin of the scars [on his face]. And then two, he really had, like, an attack dog on his arm. I don’t know how many times we did that scene — at least 10, probably? Let’s say five to 10 takes.

Drakoulias: I went and recorded vocals with Seal, and he took it really seriously, worked really hard on it. He’s like, “OK, OK, this is some crazy shit, but I get it.” Goes in, nails the take. Seal was fantastic. Same with Emma [Stone] and [the fake dance-pop track] “Turn Up the Beef.” [Sings:] “Un po-co pi-can-te, un po-co pic-an-te…” Just total professionals.

Taccone: There’s several that didn’t make the album that I wish I had cracked. I wrote a song called “The Art of Storytelling,” where the joke is just that Conner is talking about what a great storyteller he is — the way that Jay-Z is like, “Yeah, I’m the best at stories.” But it’s all Conner misremembering: “Wait, wait, wait, no… it wasn’t… It was not summer. I remember because I had pants on…” It’s just this, like, mess of a story. I wish we had cracked that joke.

Drakoulias: It’s funny because the songs, they’re all like two minutes long. You know, now everything’s like two minutes, two and a half minutes. I remember I worked on Barbie, and we did a song with Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. When it came in, I was like, “Hey, it’s like a minute [and] 54 seconds, can we do the chorus again?” They’re like, “No, it’s good for the algorithm!” Some of the [Popstar] songs I wish were a little longer. That’s the only thing I would say. But the guys had such goodwill. Everybody wanted them to win.

Part 4: Stay Hungry

“Popstar” revolves around the Lonely Island, but the guys assembled a who’s who of “SNL” veterans and comedy heavyweights — Maya Rudolph, Tim Meadows, Bill Hader, Sarah Silverman, Kevin Nealon, Will Arnett, Eric Andre — to play everything from bit parts to supporting roles. A strong contender for the film’s non-Lonely Island MVP, however, was a virtually unknown Second City alum and stand-up comic who was cast to play the Tyler-esque hip-hop loose cannon Hunter the Hungry.

Chris Redd (Hunter): I was out in L.A. doing stand-up — just doing everything I could comedy-wise. [Casting director] Allison Jones, who had brought me in for a couple things, got my name in the room for this. I think it may have been Tina Fey, too, because I had also auditioned for a pilot that Fortune Feimster was doing, and that’s where I met Tina. [Tina] had championed the shit out of me for a long time. I didn’t know this until later.

Redd auditioned with the scene where Hunter messes with Conner, alternately claiming responsibility…and then not…after a performance gimmick goes wrong, leaving Conner naked onstage.

Yeah, the “Did I… or did I not?” scene. That was so funny, and something I knew I could do. I had, like, three or four different takes on how I wanted to do it, and it just felt like one of those bits that I could do for a long time. I had come from music — I was rapping long before I got into comedy. So freestyling was my strong suit.

I remember I also freestyled for them for, like, three to four minutes, and it was way too long. Way, way more than they would have ever needed to use [laughs]. But, for me… it felt like I had to put it all on the table. They were, like, “We’re very impressed with your ability to rap, Chris. And you don’t need to do it that long anymore. We got it after the first minute.” [Laughs.] I couldn’t even tell you what was in it. I just know it was way too long, bro.

Taccone: I [wrote] all the Hunter songs, because I was like, “This is just flowing out of me.” All the nonsense rap and, like, hating your father kind of stuff. I’m like, “I got you. I can do this.” [Pauses.] I mean, I don’t hate my father, but, you know… [Laughs.]

Redd: I might have added one or two little bits here and there, but it’s all them. It’s all a fully realized Lonely Island production. I was just happy to be a part of it, because you’d hear it and go, “Shit, this could be a real fucking song. It’s a real banger!” Those guys are fucking scientists when it comes to comedy, man. They did so much work on those pieces, it wasn’t much else to add once I got there, except myself and my energy.

I remember hearing beats that, like, I want! I’m like, “Damn, y’all” — like, there were some beats that didn’t make it in… “Y’all gonna use that? Because I could use that!” I like when the beats are terrible. But that’s not really my favorite kind of thing to make, you know what I’m saying? So it was just like the highest level of what I love about comedy and music. These guys just went above and beyond on that shit.

Part 5: A Little Help From Their (Famous Musician) Friends

When it came time to shoot some of Conner’s live performances, the Lonely Island guys lucked into being able to shoot at one of L.A.’s most famous concert venues. They also got an assist from some old friends who were currently on an arena tour, as well as a handful of musical legends who agreed to sit for the faux-interview segments.

Schaffer: We shot at the Forum for 11 days. It had just been renovated, and it was not fully booked yet. So we were able to get it for 11 days in a row, which I doubt you could do now. We would just dress different dressing rooms to look different and say, oh, now we’re in, you know, New York, or wherever. All the stuff on stage of him performing that’s supposed to be in different cities — because the stage always looks the same no matter where you go — it’s all at the Forum.

Levine: We did a concert somewhere in Orange County, maybe? And they were like, “Hey, can we use your stage?” Because at that time, we were touring in America in arenas, and it was like a big production, and I said, “Yeah, of course, of course.”

Schaffer [from 2016]: Maroon 5 let us pick up some shots before a show they did in Anaheim, and it was weird when it was just us walking out before, I don’t know 18,000 to 20,000 [people]. There’s this enormous crowd waiting to see this huge band play, and here’s me and Jorma, going, [awkward voice] “Hiiii…”

Samberg [from 2016]: “Could you 20,000 people just help us out real quick?” But they were super great.

Schaffer [from 2016]: We had to add the Adam Levine hologram in post-production. The company we used, Digital Domain, they made the Tupac hologram for Coachella. I should mention that ours did not cost millions, however.

Levine: I think I couldn’t be there, maybe — like it was physically impossible for me to be there when they needed me to be. So that might have been how it morphed into me being a hologram… When I saw the scene for the first time, I was like, “Holy shit!” Because I remember when I shot the green-screen [scenes] I was like, “I’m pretty sure at some point I had to have been humping the air, because it wasn’t AI me.” [Laughs.]

Samberg [from 2016]: Levine was so generous to us on this thing. He let us come and shoot at his show. He let us come on The Voice. He performed with me on The Voice, and did a whole fake Q&A thing with Conner.

Taccone: The calling card of being able to say, “Look, we’ve worked [on SNL] with Rihanna. We’ve worked with Justin. We’ve worked with Gaga” — it made it much easier to ask a lot of people to do cameos.

Apatow: I think the music community really respects them and knows that they do something very special. A lot of people had met them doing Saturday Night Live and were excited to be a part of it. Especially Michael Bolton. That might have been the most exciting day, was when Michael Bolton came, because everyone loves that pirate song [“Jack Sparrow”]. I mean, there might have been some people who appreciated Walk Hard and felt like they might be in good hands, because we always want everybody to be really funny and come off well. But it’s not like they need me to help them get, you know, Questlove.

Taccone: Mariah Carey’s comment [in the movie] about being the humblest person she knows — that was a written joke. You’re like, “Does she understand the joke?” She completely does. She delivers it too well to not get it. She completely sells the shit out of it. I was in love with her growing up, so to be sitting across from a person with that kind of talent and that uber-voice, having already put this person on a pedestal, and then have them execute something that you didn’t know that they would be necessarily good at, or would maybe think is disparaging? To see that they’re totally able to poke fun at themselves? I was like, “Oh, you’re even cooler than I imagined.”

Apatow: She’s my favorite. I’d like to get Mariah Carey involved in every project I ever do.

Drakoulias: That Mariah Carey bit at the end of that song… That’s the thing, people weren’t afraid to make fun of themselves, you know, which was great. They all played it seriously, but no one took themselves too seriously when they showed up. I remember Ringo showing up — that was a big day on set. Everybody got a picture of Ringo.

Apatow: One of my greatest memories was when we were shooting at the Forum, and Akiva, Jorma, and Andy were very busy. So they said, “Hey, will you interview Ringo Starr? Because we don’t have time…” So he’s at the Forum in a room, and I’m basically going to interview Ringo Starr as if the band is real, and talk to him about his thoughts about their career, and also about bands that break up, right? Someone said to me, just don’t talk about the Beatles with him. I guess everyone annoys him with the same Beatles questions.

So I started asking him questions about the way bands form and how hard it is to get along with your bandmates. Every answer, he referenced the Beatles. And then at one point, I’m talking about the tragedy of bands breaking up, you know, in a real documentarian way. And I said, “Do you ever think it’s good that the Beatles broke up? Because if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have gotten all that other music, like, you know, like ‘Imagine,’ ‘Photograph,’ ‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’ All Things Must Pass.” And he just goes, [yelling] “No! It’s not good that the Beatles broke up!!! What the hell are you talking about?!”

Part 6: Whose Dick Is It, Anyway?

As any fan will tell you, there are two top-tier dick jokes in “Popstar.” One of them involves a costume change gone horribly wrong. The other involves an actual, honest-to-god penis that Conner ends up signing after a fan slaps it against the window of a limo he’s sitting in. Who that penis belongs to, well… that’s a long story, shrouded in mystery.

Taccone [from 2016]: The writing process is not like a normal movie, because it was documentary format. We could add on to things. So we were changing and rearranging things all throughout the edit process.

Schaffer [from 2016]: Through production, through the last days of shooting, and through the editing, we were still adding things. The writing never stopped.

Samberg [from 2016]: It never stopped never stopping.

Taccone: There were two different [early] screenings that I distinctly remember. We showed a version that we were not proud of, and we knew wasn’t ready. We kind of felt like it was rushed. I can’t remember how it tested, but it was early days. And then we were really edited the shit out of it. We put a tremendous amount of work into adding little things.

Schaffer: Well, the dick-in-the-limo thing… It was a reshoot, first of all. We had edited together the whole movie. We knew that the emotional story wasn’t quite kicking the way we wanted, and that’s when Judd came in and said, “I think you’re missing a scene in the middle where you guys confront each other.” We’d set everything up where my character and Andy’s character are in different worlds, and we had them coming together in the third act, but there was no meeting in the middle at all.

We had written the scene where [Conner] tried to “parent-trap” us. We had the footage of me showing up to the arena, there was the teeniest of interactions, and then I go home like it didn’t happen. It was like a false start. Judd told us, “I think there we are craving to see what happens.” But we have no money left for shooting, we’re in post, and we’re like, “How do we do this in a containable way when we don’t have any production value?” The fix became: What if these two are just stuck in a car together? That’s very shootable, because you’re just using a parking lot and a few extras.

But the scene still didn’t feel complete. Apatow made another astute suggestion, and the guys followed through with the most outrageous thing they could think of.

Taccone: Judd pointed out to us: “I think you need a big tentpole laugh in this area.”

Apatow: I remember talking about this. It was that classic joke of: There’s always a woman pushing her chest up against the window of a rock star’s car, and of how far that could go.

Schaffer: I don’t remember whose idea it was of starting with the boobs on the window, and then moving on to [the dick], and [Conner is] trying to posture that he’s comfortable with it. But I do remember when we wrote it, we were like, “Can we really do this?” We had done test screenings at that point, and the crazier the jokes were, the better the reaction was. The audience wants us to go there, wherever there is. And still, we had this feeling of “I don’t know if we’ll pull this part off.”

Taccone: I will say, it was one of the weirder experiences as a director to be sent a bunch of emails of dicks and be like, “Do you like this one?” I now know what ladies have to deal with just thinking, like, “No. I don’t want to see these fucking dicks.” I don’t want to, like, open my email and be like, “Here’s a dick. You like this one?” You really have to step back and be like, “Yes, OK, that’s a pretty nice dick.” As directors, Akiva and I were both like, “Yeah, you know what? That’s a good-looking dick.”

Levine: When he’s in the limo signing things, and then the guy, like, whips it out and it’s on the glass… It’s one of my favorite moments, because it was so fucking ridiculous.

Schaffer: We sent the scene to Judd, he read it, and emailed back something like, “It’s time for the dick to come out of the box, boys.”

The rumor back in the day — and again, let’s stress that this was just a rumor — was that the penis in the movie belongs to none other than Apatow.

Apatow: [Pauses.] This is like the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer. We all have an agreement to never talk about it. It gets ugly sometimes, but I do have to stay true to the pact of silence.

Levine: I know for a fact that it was Apatow. [Pauses.] I’m kidding. I have absolutely no idea if it was him or not. But if it was? Then good for him.

Apatow: The funny thing about it is, when you test out [graphic] jokes like this, there’s always a limit to how many frames it can be onscreen so it’ll get a laugh. But then, if it lingers, people just stand up and walk out of the theater. I think people go from joy to horror very quickly.

Taccone: When the window goes down and the dick, like, reverberates on the glass? We couldn’t predict that. I mean, like, of course it was gonna do that. But just sitting in the limo and watching that reverberation on the monitor was… [Laughs.] Those guys had to be on camera. They had to concentrate on being in the moment. I could look at the monitor and go, “OK guys, great! This is really good!”

Schaffer: I don’t think we would have had the balls… sorry. I don’t think we would have the guts to do a scene like that during the main principal photography. I think we had to have those audience reactions from the test screenings, and then go, “Let’s give them what they want.”

Apatow: Full-frontal male nudity — I am always for that. It’s wrong to women for men not to do it in all their films. I feel like people always enjoy it, and it’s not something we should deny them.

Part 7: “It Doesn’t Feel Like a Parody at All Anymore”

“Popstar” is timeless in some respects — and downright prescient in others. Because life has a way of imitating art, even if it’s art that’s meant to be an extreme, totally absurd version of reality.

Samberg: The other crazy thing about Popstar is like, as we were writing it and shooting it and even editing it, some of the stuff that we had put in as comedy started just becoming reality. We had to cut things or make them crazier, because our version was too tame. The Aquaspin gag and the songs playing out of washer dryers and shit? That stuff has happened!

Schaffer: We wrote it two years before it came out, right? So we wrote that joke about the appliances simply having music automatically added to them — and then the U2 thing happened [where the band’s 2014 album was automatically downloaded to every iTunes account] either while we were writing or just after we had finished writing the script. We went, “Oh, my god, do we need to kill that joke?” And then we went, “No, no, no, it’s fine. People will just think we’re referencing it, and maybe they’ll enjoy it even more.” It was like, you could just see the writing on the wall. And since then, of course, all your appliances, if you buy them now, are on Wi-Fi, some of them have screens on the front of fridges, and they literally will play you music.

I know we had a joke about Conner having Nike shoes shaped like a turtle, and then Macklemore had salmon-colored sneakers because he’s from the Pacific Northwest…

Taccone: The Conner joke was much funnier than Macklemore’s, because with the Air Maximus, your big toes stuck out of the shoes like a turtle head. And then he was, like, shocked that no one wanted to buy it. There was a second where we were like, “Oh, no, Macklemore is going to think we’re making fun of his shoe.” But it was just in the DNA of the culture.

Schaffer: At one point, I randomly wrote down “songs about Spain.” It just seemed like a funny thing, to have Conner suddenly singing about being in Spain. And then right after we did it, Mike Posner did “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” and it was like… [Laughs.] I think Ed Sheeran had a song about Spain as well [“Barcelona”].

There were so many things. They made a Flatliners remake. The way Trump would brag about being humble was exactly the way we were doing it during the election. I remember hearing about Kodak Black’s turtle dying in 2019 and going, “What the fuck? Did we predict the death of Kodak Black’s turtle?”

There’s the A$AP Rocky joke of him being on a Lunchables, which was like us going, “What’s the dumbest celebrity endorsement you could do?” And now there’s RXBAR [and Ice-T]. Travis Scott was on the front of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup cereal boxes. It looks exactly like our parody. All of that seemed so far-fetched. Now, it’s not even a joke.

Samberg: There were at least 25 times with jokes we wrote, where it was like, “This would be hilarious and wild!” — and then it happened, and we’d be like, God damn, our world is quickly becoming crazier than satire.

Schaffer: It doesn’t feel like parody at all anymore.

Part 8: Incredible Parting Thoughts

Upon its initial release, “Popstar” didn’t exactly set the box office on fire; it grossed roughly $9 million off of a $20 million budget, and was considered to be a failure. History has thankfully redeemed the Lonely Island’s take on fame, excess, and spiraling superstars.

Redd: The guys even said it at the time: “You know, we make cult classics. They don’t do well right away, but people will love it later.”

Apatow: Even Spinal Tap wasn’t big at the box office originally. It was discovered afterwards on home video. This is one of those films that people really discovered in the streaming era, and it just never goes away, because it’s so well-crafted and so funny. It definitely captures that moment in pop history, and all of it completely holds up.

Redd: I look at it like, “Why? Why didn’t it work at that time?” Was it how much people hated Justin Bieber at the time? I have nothing against Bieber. He’s a nice kid, and what Bieber has done lately has been really dope. But, like, back then he was pissing people off. And I felt like when we were doing the press and the marketing for it, I think it felt like another Bieber thing for some people. I think we got grouped in with that, and in a way, maybe America was just tired of Bieber at that time.

Taccone: I’d love to know what Katy Perry and Justin Bieber think of it as much as you would. We worked with Bieber on the 100^th digital short. He’s a great guy. I think Bieber grew up within this industry, and ended up, like, finding himself, too. Which is kind of the plot of the movie. I mean, Conner certainly doesn’t look like Bieber. I would hope [Bieber] didn’t, like, you know, have a samurai sword in his house and drive ATVs around.

Redd: The more I look back at it, the more I’m like, damn, it was the timing of it all. I wish we could have just re-released that shit a year ago. It would have been a lot different.

Taccone: I tend to get Hot Rod or MacGruber quoted back to me more from people on the street. But musicians? They tend to quote Popstar. I mean, to have Ahmir [Thompson] from the Roots or Lin-Manuel Miranda, where it’s like, “Oh, these guys understand this world.” To have them be fans… That’s where I get the validation. I’ve been blown away by some folks’ reactions to this.

Schaffer: It felt like the culmination of the very specific version of our comedy and personalities. Our joke music is such a combination of the alchemy of where we grew up at the time we grew up. It feels so specific, at least to us, of being kids in the Nineties in the Bay Area, when hip-hop was everything, when pop music was everywhere, when you could hear all different types of reggae and old soul music and punk. During every lunch break at school, you’d have kids doing freestyle raps in one corner, and then you’d have kids who’d be going to [punk club] Gilman Street in the other. So there was just so much musical stuff going on all around us that it helped inform us and create us, even before SNL. And that’s all in Popstar. It was still the three of us, but now there’s, you know, hundreds of people around us helping us do it, and we rented out the Forum.

Redd: It’s funny, I’m homies with Lil Rel Howery, and he’d just blown up because of Get Out. And I used to joke with him that “Popstar could have been my Get Out… if people had just gone the fuck out to the theater to see it!” [Laughs.] I think about how kind of unfair it was that people didn’t see it. I’m so grateful that people love it now. But mostly I’m just so proud of it, man.

So, will there ever be a “Popstar” sequel?

Taccone: I think that we’re always on to the next thing, you know. I mean, the same way with the digital shorts — and maybe it came from SNL —there’s a little bit of an Etch A Sketch attitude. Like, what’s next on the platter? It’s not to say that there couldn’t be a different kind of incarnation. I mean, it would be hilarious if it was ever a Broadway musical. But I also want to make MacGruber into a Broadway musical, so…I think it would just need to be that it’s a different incarnation of something to make us interested in it.

Samberg: I’m sure in 50 years, we’ll watch it and be like, “Oh God, this thing’s problematic.” That’s just the nature of all culture and all things. And I hope that is the case, because it’ll mean that we’ve evolved in the right direction here.

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Taccone: We’re older now. We probably want to do different jokes. I mean, we’re doing the pod [The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast], and that’s a really nice touchstone reconnection, just a great way to see your friends. But it’s like a hub of a wheel, you know. We’re all sort of doing our own thing, and then it goes back into the center. We’re always gonna be connected. And obviously I’d love to be able to do something new with those guys. When it’s the three of us, it really is kind of where the magic is.

I mean, it’s partially a real story. That’s one thing I remember in rewatching part of it was being like, “Holy shit, we got away with making an entire movie about the three of us being friends. We have, like, a document of us talking about our friendship for all time.”