How Ben Platt Transformed Addison Rae’s ‘Diet Pepsi’ Into a Viral Ballad: ‘It’s Been So Bizarre’

Just over halfway through the 2025 Las Culturistas Culture Awards, a major upset took place. Presenting the award for Best News We Heard — which included fierce competitors like “Lorde is performing tonight at Washington Square Park” and “They found our bags!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” — actress Rachel Bloom revealed that a candidate not previously nominated had remarkably beaten out the nominees.

“Wow, sorry, this is a really huge upset,” Bloom said, feigning shock as she stared at the card in front of her. “In a Culture Awards first, a write-in candidate has won: ‘Ben Platt is here to sing a Record of the Year nominee.’”

What followed Bloom’s announcement was nothing short of a masterclass in live performance and comedic timing. Platt, who has performed at a number of major awards ceremonies since rising to fame with Broadway’s Dear Evan Hansen in 2017, appeared on stage in front of a full string section to deliver an emotionally resonant, beautifully sung rendition of Addison Rae’s viral hit “Diet Pepsi.”

In the two weeks since the ceremony debuted on Bravo, and subsequently began streaming on Peacock, fans have been obsessing over Platt’s performance. Thousands of videos on TikTok have been dedicated to praising Platt’s stunning vocals and calling on the singer to release a full version of the song — the praise was so immediate that four days after the show debuted, Platt put out a full live recording of the track from the show.

“It’s been so bizarre,” Platt tells Billboard with a laugh over Zoom. “Like, I’ve certainly had a lot of ups and downs and wonderful moments in terms of my career. But in terms of virality and having this moment that lives so specifically online, this is very much uncharted territory for me. And I certainly didn’t expect it to be this.”

It helps that Platt’s performance was perfectly in line with the larger context of the show. Since starting as a bit on Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’ podcast Las Culturistas, the Culture Awards exist as a send-up of the entertainment awards show format. Everything about the 2025 ceremony, from the opening monologue to its hilarious “In Absentia” segment, was intended to both celebrate and mock the self-seriousness of awards ceremonies likes the Emmys, Oscars and Grammys.

“We wanted to pay very specific homage to this type of ceremony that we love but is also so ripe for parody,” Rogers says. “These award shows take themselves very seriously, and so we wanted to follow and honor that seriousness while going off the rails with the details.”

Yang agrees, adding that past versions of the show were “a little more freewheeling” since they weren’t being televised. “Focusing it on the conventional awards show moments made it an easier pitch to the network and gave Matt and the writers and me a point of view to work from,” he says.

One of the formats the pair knew they wanted to spoof from early on was the concept of the moving awards show ballad — where a celebrated singer delivers a gorgeous performance of their nominated song, and does so with as much emotional heft as possible. The pair realized that they had already booked Platt to appear and perform at the show, and when they looked at the group of songs they’d nominated in the category of Record of the Year, Rae’s “Diet Pepsi” immediately stood out.

“Something inside me said, ‘Ben should do Diet Pepsi’ and I’m happy I spoke it out loud,” Rogers recalls. “We texted him and asked him to cover it ‘like ‘My Heart Will Go On’ at the Oscars.’ I figured it would be hilarious, and Ben has a great sense of humor. That’s where it started. From a place of comedy. I thought, ‘and it’ll probably be gorgeous because it’s Ben.’ But that part was honestly secondary.”

Platt, for his part, was only tangentially familiar with Rae’s breakout song. The singer says his husband Noah Galvin was “a little more in tune with culture than I am” and was a fan of the song — but while Platt had heard the song and “knew it was hooky and great,” but had never personally connected the song with himself. “There’s sort of an antithesis energy to that,” he says.

When asked by Yang and Rogers to perform at the ceremony, though Platt’s immediate response was “I’ll do anything, whatever you want.” Listening back to the song, the singer says he and producers Leland and Gabe Lopez immediately began working on what would make the joke land. Platt began sending Leland audio clips of himself performing the song at his piano, leading the producer to create a backing track for his performance within 48 hours.

Part of the immediate process that struck Platt was treating his cover of the song as seriously as possible, if only to make the juxtaposition of earnestness and absurdity pop. “In my head I was like, ‘I feel like the more sort of deadly serious and lyrically authentic that I can present this, the better,’” Platt says. “That’s what made this so fun and joyful and unserious in the best way.”

Yang recalls the first time he and Rogers heard the song in Leland’s Los Angeles studio, where Platt performed it live for the two of them. “I was sort of stunned into silence, but did have the instinct to whip out my phone and record video, just because I knew it was something special that I’d want for posterity,” he says. “It just speaks to Ben’s talent and willingness to commit to something unknown, both in the booking of the show to do something and then for that something to be a song he hadn’t connected to yet. Obviously he locked the f–k in at some point and the rest is history.”

For his part, Rogers could not help but feel affirmed in watching his idea bear such marvelous fruit. “I looked at Bowen like … ‘this is beyond what we expected.’ The arrangement and his performance are insane,” he says. “It was so much fun to be there and watch the work. And I knew, knowing Ben as a friend and a fan of his music, that he was going to absolutely wail over those last choruses. In the studio, he held back. But I knew what was coming.”

What came was a wave of online enthusiasm over Platt’s performance, with fans across all areas of the internet showering Platt with praise for his cover of the song. Some fans even declared that the singer had “Kelly Clarkson’d” the original song, referring to a Clarkson’s own trend of covering songs on her daytime talk show to rave reviews.

“I mean, she is top-tier, one of the greatest vocalists of all time, I’ve been a die hard fan since the very beginning, and I got the huge privilege of singing ‘Make You Feel My Love‘ with her on her show,” Platt says of the comparison. “Anytime I’m in the same sentence with her is fantastic. And I agree with them that, like, whenever Kelly sings a song, it’s like, ‘Well, we had a good run, but now it’s Kelly’s.’ So for people to feel that this is a situation like that makes me very happy.”

Other commenters pointed out that the audience’s reaction to Platt’s sober rendition of a pop song felt reminiscient of when Glee would release their own song covers back in the day. “I think that’s the last time that there was a sort of cultural machine giving us pop covers done earnestly or narratively,” Platt says. “I mean, I was a huge Gleek, so I love it, and I agree; I would love for there to be a musical TV show where we’re getting weekly covers of the hits of the day done as bleeding-heart ballads.”

Yang, meanwhile, has particularly enjoyed watching have a “delayed but profound response” to Platt’s hilarious ad-lib where he wails “I like it from the fountain” in the final chorus. “It’s this flair that doesn’t fully register for people because the first dozen times you’re just blown away by the vocal,” Yang says.

Among all of that reaction, Rogers points out that none of this would have been possible had Addison Rae herself not written such a transformative pop song. “What’s most special to me about the cover is that it reveals what a fantastic song that Addison Rae created to begin with,” he says. “It is really evocatively written and the melodies are beautiful. Not every song just holds up like this after it transitions genre. It’s a testament to what a lovely artist she has become and is becoming.”

As for Platt, he recognizes the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of this moment, and feels like he has a better understanding of the internet as a result. “I feel like it was such a lesson in the idea that the moment that you aren’t necessarily trying for something like this to happen, it randomly catches fire,” he says. “I’m still sort of adapting to the reality that this became anything more than just a really fun night. It’s been wonderful to see it draw people to other performances of mine and other covers and my own music — anything that can reopen that door is such a blessing.”