Kendrick Lamar‘s historic Super Bowl halftime show has been explored in a new documentary produced by the NFL.
Available to watch for free on YouTube, the 32-minute film reveals how the most-watched Super Bowl performance in history came to be.
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Featuring interviews with some of the 500 people involved in the production, the documentary includes footage of Kendrick rehearsing, his team preparing a back-up plan in case adverse weather affected his performance and how everything came together in crunch time on the big day.
Crucially, the documentary details the mission to find a rare 1987 Buick GNX, which had to be modified and gutted to allow 30 dancers to jump out of it at the beginning of the show.
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Mike Carson, creative director for pgLang, says in the film: “The car is the icon of this era for him as far as album covers [GNX], in the video, so it was only right to have it as part of the performance.”
Watch the documentary below.
A nationwide search for the iconic ‘87 GNX.
Full Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl Halftime documentary now live on NFL YouTube: https://t.co/k9f9y1A2dX@AppleMusic@RocNation@kendricklamar#AppleMusicHalftimepic.twitter.com/Ofg7tvjL2L
— NFL (@NFL) March 15, 2025
A previous behind-the-scenes clip was released of Kendrick Lamar rehearsing with Samuel L. Jackson, who narrated the halftime show.
The two-minute-long clip — titled “Rehearsal Day 20” and dated February 5, just days before the big game — showed the legendary actor in a giant rehearsal space performing his theatrical lines as “Uncle Sam.”
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It also captured Kendrick rehearsing his much-discussed performance of his hit Drake diss song “Not Like Us,” albeit mouthing the lyrics instead of rapping them.
Elsewhere in the video, Lamar and Jackson shared a laugh with others involved in the complex production, while SZA, Mustard and Serena Williams — who all joined Kendrick on stage in New Orleans — also made brief cameos.
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pgLang additionally shared a series of behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram, showing Kendrick and SZA rehearsing their duets, early plans for the video game-inspired stage design and the modified Buick Grand National car that featured in the beginning of the show.
Kendrick’s longtime manager and creative partner Dave Free also recently shed light on the Super Bowl halftime show, which was viewed by a record 133.5 million people.
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“We wanted this performance to have a cinematic and theatrical element to it. We can confidently say that there’s no Super Bowl performance that’s quite like this one,” he told the Wall Street Journal.