Verizon's Super Bowl LVIII ad with Beyoncé almost broke something: the commercial's co-star, Tony Hale.
The two-time Emmy winner struggled to keep the lively collaboration a secret from his teenage daughter Loy Ann Hale, but he eventually cracked the code.
“My daughter had gone to his concert and was telling me everything. I didn't go, but she and I had just seen the movie 'Renaissance'. Obviously I'm a fan. “It was all incredibly cool and exciting,” Hale told Variety. But keeping the commercial undercover was especially challenging after his wife, Martel Thompson Hale, a makeup artist, worked with him on the ad.
“For three weeks afterward we couldn't mention it. We thought: 'This is killing us.' She had asked: 'What are you guys doing?' She was like, 'Oh, we're just shooting this industrial for a tech company.' “She didn't think twice.”
But her daughter began putting the clues together as teasers were sent throughout the week.
“She coded it. She's also a huge Taylor Swift fan and it's all about clues and coding. She noticed the lemons and me saying “wait” at the beginning of the preview. In a way I didn't want her to see the teaser because she wanted to record it when she was watching the Super Bowl, but these teenagers are too smart.”
The big game's standout ad, a play on Bey's ability to “break the Internet,” shows the “Cuff It” and “Crazy in Love” hitmaker attempting to break Verizon's 5G network by streaming live on a lemonade stand, playing sax, impersonating “BarBey,” running for BOTUS (Beyoncé of the United States of America), and performing in outer space. All with Hale obediently at her side.
“We're the obvious couple!” Hale told Variety. “I love the contrast between the most powerful icon and then… me! The guy who usually plays castrated sidekicks!
In fact, Hale is no stranger to that typecasting, playing supporting roles to major TV characters Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) on “Veep” and Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) on “Arrested Development.” But the actor welcomed it, as well as his time with Bey, and described the singer as “the nicest person.”
“Obviously, she's incredibly talented, but she couldn't keep her feet on the ground,” he said. “That's the great thing about this business: When you meet these icons, you see the humanity. “She is very normal and sweet.”
It's no surprise that even this normal, sweet icon is a marketing genius. At the end of the announcement and after none of Bey's attempts to break the web worked, the singer turned her unexpectedly tongue-in-cheek act into a real-life surprise fall, during the most-watched television event of all time. She announced the release of new music from Act II of “Renaissance,” the country-inspired singles “Texas Hold 'Em” and “16 Carriages.”
“My conclusion was that I would like to see her do more comedy,” wrote Times television critic Robert Lloyd in his review of the big game commercials. “It makes sense that investment has been overwhelmingly focused on comedy: funny ads are more likely to be remembered, talked about and rerun, and if brevity is the soul of wit, as it certainly is of Modern attention span, repetition is the lifeblood of advertising. “
And just like that, the cowboy hat Bey wore to the Grammy Awards earlier this month made a lot more sense.
