'Red Notice' director explains how the Ed Sheeran cameo was pulled off
- Sheeran was always the movie's surprise cameo, Rawson Marshall Thurber told Insider.
- "His name was in my notebook when I was scratching out all the ideas for 'Red Notice,'" he said.
At the end of "Red Notice," Netflix's buddy comedy/heist movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, the movie's star power levels up even more when Ed Sheeran appears out of nowhere.
Sheeran begins to perform his hit song "Perfect" at the fancy wedding where Johnson and Gadot's con artist characters provide stolen jeweled eggs to the bride's family. When the authorities show up to claim the eggs, all the guests, including Sheeran, are taken away.
Sheeran does not go away quietly. He yells at the authorities while being pulled away: "Don't you know who I am? I was in 'Game of Thrones,' I'm Ed Sheeran, bitch!"
Director Rawson Marshall Thurber told Insider that Sheeran being the movie's surprise cameo was always his plan.
"It was so much Ed that his name was in my notebook when I was scratching out all the ideas for 'Red Notice,'" Thurber said.
"I was put in touch with Ed by a mutual friend and I emailed him and asked if he would do this," he continued. "I sent him a picture of my notebook with his name in it. He's the most delightful human being on the planet and he said he was in. 'The weirder the better,' he told me. And I said, 'That's my guy.'"
But it was a logistical nightmare to shoot Sheeran for the movie, Thurber said, because of rules around live performances in the middle of the pandemic.
"His scene was the very last thing we shot for the movie," said Thurber, who flew to London for one day to shoot the cameo.
"Because he sings in the scene, we had to be a certain distance away, so we had to have a remote-operated camera shoot him," he said. "It made everything incredibly tricky to achieve. But he was a real trooper. It is one of my favorite moments in the film."
"Red Notice" is available now on Netflix.