'So Good You'd Do Anything For It': Fyre Festival's Andy King Teams Up with Evian for New Campaign
On January 18, 2019, the world first learned the name of Andy King, an events producer who worked with Billy McFarland on the disaster that was Fyre Festival.
If you’ll recall, the failed festival completely broke the internet when it first made headlines in April 2017. At the time, McFarland, his partner Ja Rule, and Fyre CMO Grant Margolin aimed to plan and execute a luxury music experience on Pablo Escobar’s former island in the Bahamas in a span of less than six months.
What was supposed to be a weekend in paradise with “the best in food, art, music and adventure” for partygoers willing to shell out up to $250,000 ended in a total media tornado. Attendees that managed to actually travel to the “private” island found utter and complete chaos — no luxurious housing, no gourmet meals, barely any water, and certainly no musical acts.
In order to keep the music festival afloat, King infamously said in the documentary that he drove himself to the Bahamian customs office “fully prepared” to perform oral sex on an official as a bribe to get them to release multiple truckloads of Evian water to festivalgoers.
King first shared the now-viral anecdote on Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened in hopes of shedding light on what really happened in the Bahamas that weekend. Although he initially thought that the story wouldn’t “go that far,” he reportedly begged producers to cut the anecdote from the documentary.
According to TMZ, Netflix told King, “Without that scene, there isn’t a documentary.” So the scene wasn’t cut, and instead, King became the breakout star of the film.
Today, he is continuing to make the most out of a bad situation and working with Evian on a special, custom limited-edition bottle of Evian natural spring water that features a new slogan: “so good you’d do anything for it.”
“One year ago, I shared with the world my willingness to ‘take one for the team’ to bring Evian to thirsty festival-goers… and unexpectedly became an internet sensation overnight,” King said in an exclusive statement to PEOPLE. “On the first anniversary, Evian is dropping a special bottle with an all-new slogan in honor of my infamous team spirit.”
“As a long-time Evian fan — of both the water itself and the brand’s sustainable practices — I could not be more thrilled!” he continued.
In the Netflix documentary, King recalls the ends he almost went to in order to acquire the little water the festival did supply.
“We had four containers filled, four 18-wheeler trucks filled with Evian water that I had left the week before for two days to go to meetings in Bermuda for the America’s Cup,” King claims in Fyre. “And when I came back, I had missed the big meeting with customs. And of course, customs had said to Billy and the gang, you need to pay us $175,000 in cash today for us to release the water.”
McFarland was already struggling for money, so he ended up pleading with King to “save” the festival and “take one big thing for the team.”
WATCH: Fyre Music Festival Turned into ‘The Hunger Games’ for Rich People
Fortunately, despite King’s team-player spirit, the customs officer was understanding and asked only to be paid the import fee for the goods as soon as possible.
“Can you imagine, in my 30 years of a career, that this is what I was going to do?” King asks in Fyre. “I was going to do that, honestly, to save the festival.”
RELATED: From Unpaid Workers to Death Threats: 5 Shocking Things We Learned From the Fyre Fest Docs
Today, the day before the one year anniversary of divulging his devotion to Netflix-watchers everywhere, King is dropping a fun Evian custom water bottle giveaway on his Instagram.
The bottles aren’t for sale otherwise, so don’t miss out on the opportunity to get your hands on one.
