Alexa, play Lola Brooke “Don’t Play With It.”

In an interview shared by Idea Generation earlier this week, Gabrielle Union disclosed a little known fact about her 2000 blockbuster hit film Bring It On. The veteran actress claimed directors actually shot a bunch of fake scenes to give audiences the illusion that the Black cheerleading squad had screen time equal to their white counterparts.

During their chat, the show’s host, Noah Callahan-Bever, asked Union if anyone involved in the project predicted the movie would have reached “cult status” to where over two decades later, fans still dress up as the East Compton Clovers every Halloween. The 50-year-old admitted they were shocked by the success because “Bring It On was a movie we all did because we didn’t get other movies.”

But the surprises didn’t end there. “But what was interesting is, the Clovers were only in like a third of the movie. And when they started showing it to test audiences, the Clovers tested through the roof,” she recalled. In the flick, Union played Isis, the cheer captain of an insanely talented yet underfunded squad from Compton. The ladies of the pop/R&B girl group Blaque were casted as three of her teammates. The film’s plot sees the Southern California team continuously looked over as a member of the Rancho Carne Toros’ well-off squad repeatedly stole their competitor’s routines.

Union said the filmmakers never intended to add more shots of the Clovers, so they created “fake scenes that will only be in the trailer to create the illusion that it was like a 50-50 movie.” A quick online search will show how absurd their theory was. “Name a time when people spontaneously cheered during a film in a movie theater while you were in the audience,” a 2021 tweet asked. “When the East Compton Clovers won [first] place in Bring [It] On,” a user responded. That year, another account wrote, “Thinking about how the East Compton Clovers still came in first place at the end of Bring It On. What a cinematic masterpiece.” Union ended the segment noting that the movie represented “bad a**, young Black girls who refused to take s**t and never back down.”

See others giving Bring It On’s East Compton Clovers their flowers throughout the years below!