If you squint really hard, you can see Andrew Athias perform during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show.

The Philadelphia-based digital retailer was none other than B93, one of the hundreds of people dressed in bushels of grass which helped compensate sugar cane field environment Puerto Rican pop stars epic performance on Sunday.

“The crazy thing is that sometimes blades of grass get into your nose, mouth and ears, so you have blades of grass that are just in openings where grass should never be,” Athias said As it happens host Nil Köksal.

“But other than that, it’s actually quite comfortable because it’s very well padded.”

‘We couldn’t tell anyone’

Asked how he landed the role of a lifetime, Athias joked, “Bad Bunny actually called my personal cell phone in the middle of the night and asked if I wanted to be grass for the Super Bowl,” before quickly clarifying, with a laugh, “No, it was an open casting call.”

That casting call, he says, was extremely vague. They wanted people between five and six feet tall, and the photos and measurements prove it.

“That’s literally everything,” Athias said. “I didn’t know I was going to be on grass until like, you know, I flew out there and went to the third practice.”

He found out he made the cut two weeks before the Super Bowl, and rehearsals began immediately.

“My problem was the Super Bowl is 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 a forest rehearsal. But when it was over, he hopped on the first seven-hour flight to Santa Clara and got right to work.

The first thing he had to do, he said, was to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

“We couldn’t tell anyone we were doing a Bad Bunny halftime show,” he said. “My family and friends were like, ‘What are you doing there?’ I was like ‘Super Bowl’. And they’re like, ‘Do you have tickets?’ I said, ‘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 first rehearsals, says Athias. He was busy with other things, e.g accepts the Grammy for album of the yearthe first ever awarded to a record entirely in Spanish.

“There were replacements for him,” Athias said. “So instead of calling him Bad Bunny, we named this guy Good Rabbit.”

Even when they were practicing, he said, there was a lot of secrecy.

His place on the field was next to the pink house known as A small housewhich produced stars Pedro Pascal, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Cardi B, Karol G and Young Miko.

“By the way, I didn’t know all these celebrities were going to be there until I walked past them on game day,” Athias said.

In the end, Athias said he earned California minimum wage for his several 12-hour rehearsals, and the big day itself, in total approximately US$1000. This was not enough to cover the hotel and flight costs.

Still, Athias says he’d do it for free.

First of all, he’s really enjoying his 15 minutes of fame.

“I finally feel that I know what left shark it felt like being on Katy Perry’s halftime show,” he said.

Moreover, despite the chaos, hard work and secrecy, he says he is glad were part of such a beautiful moment.

“What the creative director told us almost right before we hit the field on game day was that we were representing the field of dreams and that Bad Bunny’s dream was not only to be the superstar that he is, but to 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 he’s sharing it with the world.”