Celebrity Breath Match: On the Set of TV’s New ‘Lip Sync Battle’
You gals will just come and grab onto her, right? OK, Malin, now give me your best man pose!” Malin Akerman – blonde, Swedish, not a dude – starts grabbing her crotch and throwing up devil horns, tongue out. The choreographer standing just offstage is ecstatic: “Yes! Yes! Exactly that! And then high-five the dancers’ booties!” Akerman asks their permission, but it’s a moot point: The women are already bent over their chairs, awaiting her smacks. At the moment, she’s rehearsing to sing “Talk Dirty” – which is to say, she’s pretending to sing Jason Derulo’s ode to lipstick marks on his passport and ménage à three-o’s. Everyone’s spread way too far across the stage, and the lights are getting hot, and the dancers are lining up for spankings but the song is moving too fast for her to reach them all. Plus, her running-man dance isn’t landing. Someone twerks a few feet away; impressed, the actress asks, “How do you do that?” Rehearsal ends. She’s told to “make sure to have fun out there,” as if suiting up for Little League.
Spike TV’s Lip Sync Battle, premiering April 2nd, pits two celebrities – say, John Legend and Common, or Jimmy Fallon and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, or Anna Kendrick and John Krasinski – against one another in a competition that’s part rock concert, part summer camp and all overenthusiastic pretend-crooning. Skill and talent have no place here; this isn’t MasterChef Junior. Rather, through the course of two rounds, celebrities have to sell old and new pop hits with whatever they’ve got aside from a voice, be it dance moves, costumes or – in Kendrick’s case – a surprise appearance from a sparkly Jennifer Lopez, who walks out onto a smoke-filled to help perform “Booty.” Audience applause determines the winner of a championship belt, gold and heavy like the WWE’s. Host LL Cool J sums it up in the show’s trailer: “Two stars perform two songs, each trying to out-sync and out-psyche their opponent. You go hard or you go home.”
Though the series is new, the concept is a proven commodity: Originally thought up on a whim by Krasinski, his wife Emily Blunt and British Office co-creator Stephen Merchant while road-tripping, the lip-sync game quickly found a home on their friend Jimmy Fallon’s talk shows, starting in 2013. Its most popular clip – Emma Stone mouth-engineering Blues Traveler’s “Runaround” and both T-Pain’s and Ludacris’ parts from DJ Khaled’s “All I Do is Win” – has racked up 47 million views on YouTube. (The others aren’t far behind; each entry has been streamed more than 25 million times.) Late last year, Spike TV bought the idea for an expanded primetime show after NBC passed. Casey Patterson, a Viacom development executive involved, tells the New York Times, “It was not a complicated conversation.”