- Spears revealed on Instagram she was “out of body with nerves” on the night of the performance.
- Justin Timberlake, her boyfriend at that time, helped her calm down.
- “Justin saw I could hardly talk so he held my hand and gave me a 5-minute pep talk,” She wrote.
Britney Spears took to her newly launched Instagram account on Thursday to give a glimpse into what was happening behind the scenes of her 2001 MTV Video Music Awards performance.
“I will tell you this … before I went on that night I was feeling kinda out of body with nerves,” wrote Spears, who performed her single “I’m a Slave 4 U” on stage with live animals — including a 7-foot albino Burmese python draped across her shoulders.
“I mean … I was in a cage with a live lion!!!!!” She continued. “Justin saw I could hardly talk so he held my hand and gave me a 5 minute pep talk which obviously worked.”
Justin Timberlake was her boyfriend at the time.
Spears also noted in the Instagram post that the “simple black lace” dress she wore on the VMAs red carpet that year was one of her favorite dresses she’s ever worn.
Recently the snake wrangler for the VMA performance, Mike Hano, revealed to Yahoo what went on in rehearsals after Spears came face to face with the python she later named “Banana.”
Spears “said something to me about how she ‘broke out in hives’ everywhere that the snake had touched her during the rehearsal — which is just really not possible,” Hano recalled about the second day of rehearsal, laughing.
Hano believed that Spears had the guts to endure the performance with the snake.
“Britney Spears is pretty small — and she was going to be dancing with [the python],” Hano said. “She had to position the snake on her shoulders by herself and dance around, and then she had to hand it off to a third person.”
“It’s easy to screw up that kind of thing,” He continued. “You know, it gets wrapped around your arm and doesn’t want to let go. It could have been really risky, because that was a live performance, one take.”