Red Notice is a movie full of twists and turns, but perhaps none is more surprising than the sudden appearance of Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE, 10 minutes before the credits roll. Major spoilers ahead, of course. 

Let’s set the scene: After a series of adventures, John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) and The Bishop (Gal Gadot) have left Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) behind in the South American jungle and traveled to Egypt to deliver Cleopatra’s three golden eggs to an Egyptian billionaire for the neat sum of $300 million. The plan is for him to present them to his daughter, also named Cleopatra, as a gift at her magnificent wedding outside Cairo. And, indeed, the eggs are trotted out with all the pomp and circumstance such priceless antiquities require — that is, until Cleopatra hears the opening chords of “Perfect.” Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Sheeran is in the building. 

Pushing past the elaborate case holding these jeweled eggs, Cleopatra rushes toward the back of the room, where the singer-songwriter is set up on stage with his guitar, crooning “I found a girl, beautiful and sweet.”

On a balcony overlooking the proceedings, John shrugs. “Ed Sheeran, who knew?”

“God, he’s so cute,” gushes The Bishop.  

The performance is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Inspector Das (Ritu Arya) and Egyptian special forces, who arrest the billionaire and his daughter. Ed doesn’t take kindly to that, swinging his guitar angrily in her defense before being led off screaming: 

“Get off me! Do you know who I am? I was in Game of Thrones! I’m Ed Sheeran, bitch!”

You probably have a lot of questions at this point, chief among them: How the hell did Ed Sheeran get here? 

“I’ve been a huge Ed Sheeran fan for a long time,” Red Notice writer and director Rawson Marshall Thurber told us. “He was actually in my original pitch. I had Gal Gadot’s name, Ryan’s name, Dwayne was already part of it, and I had Ed Sheeran.”

Early on in pre-production, Thurber contacted Sheeran through a mutual friend and emailed him to ask if he would ever consider making a cameo. “He’s the most delightful person on the planet,” Thurber said. “He was like, ‘Yeah, the weirder the better!’ And I was like, ‘That’s my boy!’ He was game to just play and have fun.” 

But like so many other best laid plans, Sheeran’s scene got derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced Red Notice to shut down production for six months. Thurber and his team were then faced with new restrictions and responsibilities in order to keep a safe set once shooting resumed. Suddenly, flying Sheeran in for such a brief appearance was no longer a viable option. But Thurber wasn’t willing to totally give up on the idea. 

“This is the most challenging film I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. “We had to shoot Ed by himself in London, well after principal photography was wrapped.”

Well, Sheeran did say the weirder the better. Be careful what you wish for.