Cowboy Bebop actress Daniella Pineda, who plays Faye Valentine in the upcoming Netflix live-action adaptation of the show, recently appeared to deride fans following Netflix’s first look photos at the series.
This new move by Pineda appears to be the latest marketing stunt from Netflix in an attempt to get people interested in the show.
Pineda posted an updated to her Instagram Story section called “Fan Apology.”
The video has subsequently been uploaded to YouTube by user İbrahim Açıkgöz, although the below video does not include the ending.
In the video Pineda begins, “Hey guys, as you know our Cowboy Bebop first look dropped today which was so exciting. And I just wanted to address a couple of things that keep coming up in the comments amongst fans.”
She then proceeded to sarcastically deride critics of the first look saying, “First, I wanted to apologize to the fans that I did not anatomically match the Faye Valentine character. Six foot, double D sized breasts, two inch waist. You know they looked everywhere for that woman and they couldn’t find her. It was kind of weird. So they just went with my short a**, I know am I right?”
“There was talk about like can we put Daniella in a time machine, and maybe give her different parents so she has different genetic information to sort of make her look better. It proved to be too complicated,” Pineda added.
Pineda then addressed criticism of the outfit, “The other thing I wanted to bring up, was I wanted to apologize that the outfit I’m wearing is not exactly what she wears in the anime.’
She continued, “You know we tried, but doing stunts in tissue paper, things disappear, they rip, sometimes it just got lost…”
Pineda then claimed, “Anyway, like I was saying that original costume, they made a couple of them, but like I said they sort of got slurped up in my various crevices never to be retrieved again so we really needed to build something that could withstand the test of time.”
The Instagram story video then transitions to playing Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up in an attempt to turn the video into a Rick Roll. A Rick Roll as defined by Urban Dictionary is “when what you think is a link to something you want to see actually directs you to a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up.”
While Astley’s song is playing the first look of John Cho as Spike Spiegel is shown with a heart around his face being shared by The Hollywood Reporter on Instagram.
Astley’s song continues to play as a comment on The Hollywood Reporter’s Instagram in reaction to the first look post shows Pineda wrote, “Oh man THEY BETTER NOT RUIN THIS. I mean WHERE’S Ed?? They better not mess this up! Why isn’t Faye half naked???”
It also shows Pineda typing a new comment, “COWBOY BEBOP DROPS NOV. 19th ON NETFLIX!!!!!”
Back in June 2020, the show’s Netflix writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach confirmed Valentine’s costume would be changed for the show. He explained the reasoning behind changing it saying, “we need to have a real human being wearing that.”
Not only did Grillo Marxuach confirm they would be changing Valentine’s costume, but he also revealed the show would not be a one-to-one adaptation of the anime.
He explained, “We’re not going to go one-to-one on all of those stories because we’re also trying to tell the broader story of Spike Spiegel and the Syndicate, Spike Spiegel and Julia, Spike Spiegel and Vicious, and all that.”
“But we are looking at the show and saying, ‘Who are some of the great villains in this show, and how can we put them into this into this broader narrative?’ So that we are telling both of the big stories that Cowboy Bebop tells,” he elaborated.
What do you make of Pineda’s comments? Do you think she’s being cheeky with the Rick Astley music and Instagram comments? Or do you think she means what she says and Astley is only being used to make it seem like she’s goofing off?