Still re-watching Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl halftime show, pouring over the intricate details and innumerable nods to Puerto Rican culture and history? Thanks, in large part to the minds of, Harriet Cuddeford and Yellow Studio.
The halftime show’s production was led by creative director Cuddeford and show designer Yellow Studio, who took Levi’s Stadium and transformed it into an ambitious, sprawling depiction of Puerto Rico. Unlike the traditional stage the halftime show has become known for in its lengthy history, the entire field became an immersive landscape and experience, with sugarcane fields, towering electrical poles, casitas — even a wedding, presided over by Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga.
Among these various details, all interwoven into a sprawling narrative of daily life in Puerto Rico, are real people doing their real jobs: priests, cart vendors, nail salon workers, even barbers. Working alongside record label Rimas Entertainment and art director Leticia Leon, the show is one that will absolutely endure through the ages.
In the wake of the Super Bowl, Harriet Cuddeford sat down PAPER to discuss her most ambitious project to date, collaborating with Bad Bunny and the decision to lead with community over spectacle.
First of all, congratulations.
Thank you so much. Just waking up trying to be like, wow, it happened. It happened, and it went so well and was just so…
I can't even imagine the rush you must be feeling in this moment.
Yeah, it truly is quite unhinged, if I'm being honest. But very, very cool. Very luckyt went so well. We're just so happy. You know, there's so much room for error when you're doing live TV, especially under challenging circumstances like the halftime shows. So it was so cool that everything went as we intended. It was the best run we'd ever done of all the rehearsals. Normally, when you actually do it, something goes wrong. But it really didn’t. So we were so happy.
The spirits were with you on that day. We always love those moments when they happen.
Yeah. I mean, this whole thing has been intensely spiritual. You could feel it in the stadium, just such good energy. It was beautiful.
You could feel it at home. Honestly, that’s what I want to start by talking about. There was an immediate sense of a perspective shift. With other halftime performers, it’s usually a proscenium approach. You guys immediately took the viewer on the ground with the performer, inside the community. It felt new. Tell me more about that decision. It was such a big, bold move.
It was not easy to get to. It was a big push on our side to be allowed to do that. We basically did things very differently than what they're used to at the halftime show. We really pushed for it, but it seemed like the way we wanted to tell the story. We wanted to go on a journey. The Super Bowl is typically big scale, wide shot. We were in the stadium thinking, how can we tell a story if we just do it all at once? We wanted it to unfold. We wanted to take people on a journey with him, make it more cinematic. We wanted to surprise people, build and evolve, from the beginning to the end. We start so small and intimate, in the fabric of daily life, inside the sugarcane, literally in the crops, in nature, in the earth, on the ground. We didn’t even have a ground cloth, it was earthy and real. And the people in the field, many were real. The taco guys were real taco guys from LA. The nail girl was a real nail girl. The boxers were real boxers.
We wanted to go on that journey so that by the end, you see this huge scale. Not counting the plant people, there were over 330 performers. We wanted to build to that, to give the scale, to make it feel “Super Bowl enough” so people got the wow moments, but also to do storytelling. It was an intricate dance, trying to convince people who've done it one way for so long to shoot differently, move differently. Because if you saw it all straight away, where would you go from there?
The story celebrates normal people, everyday life, love, community, family. That’s hard to convey if you go straight into big scale. You need to feel people, see people, and have that intimate connection before you go bigger.
You did such a beautiful job balancing community and spectacle. It would explode into something big, but it still felt so rooted. I'm curious, how involved was Bad Bunny in choosing the people and vignettes, like the nail salon?
He had loads of ideas. I had loads of ideas. We worked together a lot. He’s on tour, so I’d fly to different countries to meet him. He’s a feelings guy, an in-person talking guy. We’d sit down and talk. He’d have ideas, I’d have ideas, then I’d go away and work, storyboard a lot, and come back. We developed everything over months. He was super involved.
Like the Grammy kid moment—that was all him. He said, “I grew up watching my idols win awards on TV. Now my idols give me awards.” He wanted to show kids in America, especially Latino kids, that if you believe in yourself, you can make it.
And the nails! We had something else in rehearsal, and he said, “We don’t have nails. Nails would be so cool.” We added it less than a week before, which is hard in a big machine like the Super Bowl. But yeah, super collaborative.
That’s incredible. My friend Laia Garcia-Furtado posted the sweetest story during the performance, her daughter ran to get a tambourine midway through and came back to play along. That moment feels emblematic of what you set out to achieve, this joy of culture filtering out.
Everyone thought this would be a bold statement given the climate, and it was, but not a protest in the traditional sense. It was defiance through joy. Was that the intention from the start or something that evolved?
It was always a guiding principle. All the key people in this cared about energy, love, authenticity, empathy. His culture — Latino culture — is full of joy, music, love, family, dancing. The world has so much darkness, why play into that? Love is stronger than hate. Let’s inspire people, give them a good time. Even if they’re reluctantly tapping their foot—let them come together, smile, feel what makes us human.
He’s not a hate-filled person. He’s peaceful, loving, kind, and powerful in that way. It's defiance without trying to be defiant. Just: “This is who we are, and it’s wonderful.”
It definitely translated. That casita filled with cultural cameos was incredible. How were those invites sent out?
That was a management thing. I wasn’t involved in casting. They turned up literally yesterday. No rehearsal with them.
Wow. Even more real.
Unbelievably real. It was in the tunnel right before the show. These are high-profile people, you can’t rehearse with them days in advance. Last rehearsal on the field was Thursday. On the day, it was very locked down, very few people knew. We staged it in the tunnel. Charm [La'Donna], the choreographer, is amazing. She was literally on the pitch popping people into place.
I got to brief Pedro Pascal. That was not on my bingo card for 2026.
But that’s why we do what we do—for those moments you never saw coming.
Exactly. In one day I briefed 383 people dressed as grass—and then Pedro Pascal, Cardi B, and Karol G.
And the styling was so approachable, wearable, eclectic. It felt alive, not everyone in the same costume.
Exactly. Benito’s best friend and creative collaborator was involved, he works on a lot of his fashion projects. We didn’t want people to look messy, but we stuck to a color palette — creams, beiges, browns — which felt very beautiful with all the nature. In "NUEVAYoL," it was more like a street party, more individual looks. Then we also had people in the sugarcane fields doing their real jobs. So we would style them, but really just tried to help them look like the best versions of themselves.
We ended up having so many dancers partly because of quick changes, different scenes needed different styling identities. You can’t quick change everyone in that short time, so we just kept expanding the number of performers.
What an undertaking. How long was this process for you?
I got involved mid-October. We went hard starting November, and rehearsals began January 5. Everything had to be designed by then. So really, it was two months. It was a wild turnaround. But the team was unparalleled, everyone brilliant, just going for it. Even in rehearsal, we had a very clear camera plan from the beginning, storyboarding everything.
It was seven days a week. I got Christmas Day off, maybe. I got a text from a woman at the hotel I stayed in in Mexico, she actually had gone through the database and found my number to text me and was like, "The Super Bowl was so amazing. It was definitely worth you spending your entire holiday doing Zooms in like the meeting room." And I was like, Yeah, it was it was worth it. You know what I mean?
I mean, it was definitely worth it.
As creatives, we always hope to seed something into culture. If you had to distill this into one message, what would it be?
Honestly, it’s what we wrote on the billboard at the end, love is so much stronger than hate. Be who you are. Be proud. Know what you want to create and follow it. You can do it. Do everything with love.
That’s a great message we should all keep with us daily.
Yeah.
Again, congrats. Last night was a huge accomplishment. So many Super Bowl performances, but few that feel truly unique. You guys definitely accomplished that.
Honestly, it’s wonderful to meet you and hear that. Everything you’re saying, all the questions, it makes me so happy because it translated. You picked up on everything. You got it and that’s so wonderful. We kept wondering, are people going to watch this and think we’re absolutely nuts? It's so big and varied, will people follow it?
And to hear that it resonated with you, and with others, that’s all we could ask for.
Photos courtesy of Alamy
