The Logic Behind Bad Bunny Having People Dressed As Plants For Super Bowl Halftime Show

Bad Bunny's halftime show during Super Bowl LX was unique for a multitude of reasons, but two stand out: 99% of the show was in Spanish outside of Lady Gaga's quick appearance, and there were hundreds of people dressed up as plants.

Given that we're dealing with a musician and a once-in-a-lifetime performance experience, one may assume that Bad Bunny was just letting his creative juices flow by having people dress up as giant, realistic-looking plants for the show, but that's only the half of it.

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Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, was on a mission to have the halftime show have the same look as his recent Puerto Rico residency shows had, which featured plenty of palm trees and sugar cane.

Instead of simply having the plants rolled in, it was actually the stadium, and more specifically the playing surface, that made Bad Bunny and his team draw up the idea of having plant people.

"In a different stadium, that could be done by rolling carts covered in those plants onto the field. But Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, uses natural grass; the National Football League’s guidelines don’t allow that many carts onto the field, as they’d tear up the grass," Angela Watercutter of Wired reported. "The max the team could use was 25, and they needed those for the stages and other props. (The) fix was simple: dress people up like plants."

After seeing said plant people take the field, the first question that came to the mind of every viewer was ‘what the hell is going on?’ before the next question of ‘were these people paid to dress up as plants?’

The answer is yes, and a pretty decent wage at that.

How Much Were Bad Bunny Halftime Performers Dressed As Plants Paid?

Business Insider actually spoke with a man named Andrew Athias from Philadelphia, who was one of the many people who took the field dressed as foliage.

Athias explained that he was paid $18.70 per hour, but "would've done it for free."

"The requirements for the role were pretty basic. You had to be no taller than six feet, no shorter than five feet seven inches, and of an athletic build," he told the outlet.

"The listing said we had to be able to wear a 40-plus-pound costume and to be comfortable dancing in proximity with other performers for long periods. Other than that, we had to measure every part of our body from head to toe, elbow to floor, shoulder to clavicle, etc. Those were the only requirements."

Athias went on to share that there were stints during rehearsals that he and others were in the suit for six to seven hours for alteration purposes. 

With that information, that $18 per hour should have been flipped around to $81 per hour.