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LISTEN | Full interview with grass man Andrew Athias:
As It Happens6:36What it was like being a bushel of grass in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl ‘field of dreams’
If you squint really hard, you can see Andrew Athias performing during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.
The Philadelphia digital marketer was none other than B93, one of hundreds of humans dressed as bushels of grass who helped make up the sugarcane field setting of the Puerto Rican pop star’s epic performance on Sunday.
“The crazy thing is that sometimes the blades of grass get into your nose and your mouth and your ears, so you have blades of grass that are just in orifices where grass should never be,” Athias told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
“But other than that, it’s actually pretty comfortable because it’s very well-padded.”
‘We couldn’t tell anybody’
Asked how he came upon this role of a lifetime, Athias quipped: “Bad Bunny actually called my personal cellphone in the middle of the night and asked if I wanted to be grass for the Super Bowl,” before quickly clarifying, with a chuckle: “No, there was an open casting call.”
That casting call, he says, was extremely vague. They wanted people who were between five-foot-seven and six feet tall, and the photos and measurements to prove it.
“That’s literally all it was,” Athias said. “I didn’t know that I was going to be grass until like, you know, I flew out there and went to the third rehearsal.”
Performers dressed as sugarcane grass step on stage during the halftime show. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
He found out he made the cut two weeks before the Super Bowl, and rehearsal began immediately.
“My problem was that the Super Bowl is out in California,” he said, “and I’m on the east coast.”
A snowstorm delayed his first attempt to fly out of Philadelphia, causing him to miss his forest rehearsal. But once it passed, he hopped on the first seven-hour flight to Santa Clara and got straight to work.
Andrew Athias was one of hundreds of people dressed as grass at Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl 2026 halftime show (Submitted by Andrew Athias)
The first thing he had to do, he said, was sign a non-disclosure agreement.
“We couldn’t tell anybody that we were doing Bad Bunny’s halftime show,” he said. “My family and friends were like, ‘What are you doing out there?’ I was like, ‘The Super Bowl.’ And they’re like, ‘You have tickets?’ I was, like, ‘No, but I’m here for the Super Bowl and that’s all I can say.’”
Part of something bigger
Bad Bunny wasn’t around during the early rehearsals, Athias says. He was busy with other things, like accepting the Grammy for Album of the Year, the first one ever awarded to an entirely Spanish-language record.
“There was a stand-in for him,” Athias said. “So instead of calling him Bad Bunny, we called this guy Good Rabbit.”
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Even as they were rehearsing, he said, there was a lot of secrecy.
His placement on the field was next to the pink house known as La Casita, from which stars Pedro Pascal, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Cardi B, Karol G and Young Miko emerged.
“Which, by the way, I did not know that all those celebrities were going to be there until I waddled past them on game day,” Athias said.
Celebrities emerged from a pink house during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
In the end, Athias said he made California minimum wage for his several 12-hour rehearsals, and the big day itself, totalling roughly $1,000 US. It was not quite enough to cover the cost of his hotel and flight.
Still, Athias says he would have done it for free.
First of all, he’s really enjoying his 15 minutes of fame.
“I finally feel I know what the left shark felt like when he was in Katy Perry’s halftime show,” he said.
What’s more, despite the chaos, hard work and secrecy, he says he’s glad to have been part of such a beautiful moment.
“What the creative director was telling us almost right before we went onto the field on game day was that we’re representing a field of dreams, and that Bad Bunny’s dream was to not only just be the superstar that he is, but put Puerto Rico in front of billions of people,” he said.
“Because 10 years ago he was just Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, you know, bagging groceries and now he’s a superstar and the face of Puerto Rico, and sharing that with the world.”