A screenshot from Maroon 5's "Sugar" music video.; Credit: Maroon 5
Mike RoeMaroon 5 has a new music video built around a simple, viral-bait premise: Adam Levine and the rest of the band trying to crash as many weddings around Los Angeles as they can in one day (Dec. 6 of last year). It's a lot of fun, directed by "Wedding Crashers" movie director David Dobkin, but it appears that some of those "crashed weddings" may have been staged.
Watch the video (warning: contains adult language):
Maroon 5: Sugar
Fans have noticed that several of the couples seen in the video appear to be actors. Actors Stephen and Barbara Woo posted on Facebook that they played the parents of one of the brides in the video and said that not only were the weddings staged, they didn't even take place on one day, claiming that all the weddings were shot in the same location over the course of three days.
Facebook post by actors
The groom from the wedding featured the most in the video has been named by observers as Nico Evers-Swindell, according to Cosmopolitan. Evers-Swindell was already married to actress Megan Ferguson since 2011 — and she's not the "bride" in the video.
Fans have fingered one of the models as "America's Next Top Model" runner-up Raina Hein, according to Cosmopolitan. Also, the man believed to be her long-term boyfriend isn't the groom in the Maroon 5 weddings.
Don't lose heart, though — at least one of the weddings in the video appears to be real, with wedding photographer Duke Khodaverdian telling E! that yes, it was the real deal.
"It was an incredible surprise and everyone at the wedding is going to cherish those memories," Khodaverdian told E! in December.
Instagram 1
Instagram 2
A representative for the band told "Entertainment Tonight" that only the grooms knew about the band in each case — but it looks like that means in the case of the real crashed weddings. The representative did concede that some shots "had to be shot separately from the real weddings due to time and space constraints that were given," and the article does note that the video was shot over three days.
Levine expressed his excitement about crashing the weddings in an interview with People magazine.
"I had no idea I would be affected by the overwhelming reactions we received from the couples and guests," Levine said. He told "Entertainment Tonight" that it was stressful to arrange, but that the surprise felt good. "[We were] happy that they liked our band, too – [that] would have been a total disaster."
They also solicited Twitter to find people lip-syncing "Sugar" to possibly put in their music video, but it doesn't look like those submissions got used.
Maroon 5 Sugar tweet
If you want to see Levine involved in a different dubious outfit, you can see him back hosting "The Voice" on Feb. 23. Open call auditions for the show begin Jan. 24 in New York, with Los Angeles auditions on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.
Did you spot any more actors you recognize in this video? Do you have any more evidence of any of these weddings being either real or faked? Let me know on Twitter at @MikeRoe.
This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.