Ed Sheeran takes Sheerios behind-the-scenes of the video for his single “Bad Habits” in a new three-minute clip in which the singer reveals the lengths he went to turn into a slick vampire for the visual. “This was a lot of fun to shoot, apart from the jumping off a building bit x,” Sheeran wrote in a tweet teasing the glimpse of what it took to make him fly through the air with the greatest of ease in the fangtastic Dave Meyers-directed midnight monster mash.
The journey begins with a clip of Sheeran suspended from wires as he flies over a streetscape at night in his signature “Habits” pink suit, blonde hair and glitter-dusted eyeshadow surrounded by his neck-biting buddies. He also teases fans a bit by introducing the backstage video with an aside that it’s the first single from his new album, whose title is bleeped out in the clip. “Which you don’t know it’s called that yet,” says a cheekily grinning Sheeran about his fifth full-length studio album and the follow-up to 2019’s No. 6 Collaborations Project.
We then see Ed in the make-up chair getting his red hair dyed, slipping in his Transylvania chompers and trying to figure out how to “have a pee” with his long, sharp black fake fingernails. Mid-way through we also get the first up-close look at some of the other undead hipsters in the clip as they bare their sharp teeth in vampy close-ups. “I’m just really enjoying working with Dave because I have never, ever looked like this before,” Sheeran says of teaming up with video auteur Meyers.
In the next scene, Ed and Dave review an animated mock-up of one of the wire stunts in the visual, with Sheeran walking himself through a bit where his glampire leaps out of a moving car and confronts an attacker (which, it turns out, is just the disembodied torso of a crash-test dummy). In the rest of the clip Sheeran goofs around with his dancers during rehearsals and reveals that he’s “terrified” of heights as he prepares to leap off a bodega roof.
Watch the behind-the-scenes “Bad Habits” video below.
