Andy Samberg is this year's official Chief Shark Officer (read as: Host) for Discovery Channel's 24th Shark Week. For those who aren't familiar, Shark Week is Discovery Channel's full-blown shark extravaganza. They often feature documentaries about harrowing experiences with sharks (not my thing), and shark-themed episodes of their regular shows (very much my thing). Before, I only had the Mythbusters Shark Specials to get me to tune into Discovery during Shark Week (and maybe a Dirty Jobs. Mike Rowe is the best.). Now that Samberg's on board for the production, this gives me another reason to figure out how to time my Discovery watching so I don't inadvertently watch a dingy of stranded individuals get mauled.
Below are Samberg's comments on the experience as taken from EW.com's original article.
“I had reservations at the restaurant of destiny,” he jokes to EW. “It has very little to do with me on the surface, which to me was a perfect sign that I should do it. Everyone loves Shark Week. I love Shark Week. I was just so flattered. The pitch was that I would get to fly to the Bahamas and literally swim with sharks, and I was thinking there’s no way I would ever have the balls to do that on my own, so I went for it.”
“My buddy John Solomon, who’s a director and a writer at SNL came with me. We were doing a bunch of wrap-arounds for the show, and I’d been floating there in the water, and I was like, ‘Okay, I think we got that. Should we chum the water and get some sharks over here?’ And everyone on the boat kinda looked down, kinda looked away, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we should, um, get some sharks over here,’” Samberg recalls. “It turned out that there had been huge sharks all around me the entire time, and I just hadn’t realized it because they were under the water.”
“They were definitely dumping tons of bloody meat into the water all around me. I knew that they needed to do it to get the sharks over there, but there’s also a part of me that was like, have you guys heard of Photoshop? Like, we live in an era where you don’t have to actually do this. But I guess they’re purists over at Discovery,” he says. He admits falling backwards blindly into sharks, even if they’re gentle Caribbean reefs, scared him. “But I had to just kind of ignore it. I went into Braveheart mode,” he says.
“If you want to know the coolest part,” Samberg says of filming the special, “it was getting to go in the little one-man submarine and, like, drive through a bunch of tropical fish while they tickle my feet. I just kept asking everyone if they’d seen my son Nemo.”
For a 10 second of Samberg singing underwater, click on the EW article to watch the video at the bottom of the page.
For a 10 second of Samberg singing underwater, click on the EW article to watch the video at the bottom of the page.
