Sabrina Carpenter‘s big, cinematic music video for Manchild came with a painful behind-the-scenes moment. During the shoot, she had fallen onto a cactus. This accident left her in tears, and the singer had to pick spines out of her skin for the rest of the day.
However, the mishap didn’t stop her from finishing what she called a hugely ambitious production. It has led to her earning six Grammy nominations this year, including Best Music Video.
Sabrina Carpenter recalls painful Manchild MV incident
Sabrina Carpenter explained what it was like falling on a cactus during the Manchild music video shoot. She expressed, “I fell on a cactus. It’s so easy to laugh when people get hurt. And I did. But then I started crying (via Late Night with Seth Meyers).”
To her rescue, a medic was on set. However, she had to spend the rest of the day “picking s— out of…”
The “Manchild” shoot was on a large scale. Carpenter said the team filmed over three days on a movie ranch in Santa Clarita and ran through an extraordinary wardrobe count. “We shot 37 outfits,” she said, calling it “probably my biggest shoot I’ve ever done.” The video combines desert visuals with a series of high-risk set pieces, including rollerblading while holding onto a truck, jumping into a shark-filled pool, jet skis, and a shopping cart hooked to a motorcycle.
Carpenter was candid about the trade-off between ambition and discomfort. “That shoot was so ambitious… We endured a lot of pain to get the finished product,” she told Meyers, before asking viewers to support the work, saying, “Please watch it.”
Back in June, Carpenter had explained her process of writing the song. She wrote on Instagram, “i wrote manchild on a random tuesday with amy and jack not too long after finishing short n’ sweet and it ended up being the best random tuesday of my life. not only was it so fun to write, but this song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life.”
Originally reported by Preksha Sharma for Mandatory.
