Sabrina Carpenter and Dolly Parton Are Smiling Fugitives on the Run in Sweetly Sinister ‘Please Please Please’ Video: Watch
Sabrina Carpenter and Dolly Parton are a couple of smiling fugitives with a dark secret in the back of the truck in the charmingly felonious video for their collaboration on Sab’s 2024 Billboard Hot 100 hit “Please Please Please.”
In the new black and white video co-directed by Carpenter, 25, and Sean Price Williams that dropped on Friday morning (Feb. 14) as part of the expanded version of the pop singer’s Short n’ Sweet album, the women team up for a Thelma & Louise-style caper that involves kidnapping, at the very least.
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The visual for the revamp of the song that adds some country twang and fiddle to the airy pop original that was Carpenter’s first Hot 100 chart-topper opens with the two women cruising down the road in a truck as Dolly, 79, reads the paper and Sabrina serves as her wheel woman. A flash of headlines hints at something sinister amid the grinning, cutting to banners announcing the killing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in blaze of bullets, as well as breaking news about outlaws Frank and Jesse James, fictional women-on-the-fun Thelma and Louise, French pop royalty Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg and 1950s serial killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.
Bolstered by banjos, acoustic guitars and brushed drums, the two women are in perfect harmony on the soaring chorus, though you knew Dolly wouldn’t go for the original NSFW refrain, replacing the “motherf–er” with the line, “I beg you don’t embarrass me/ Like the others.”
The two appear to be having a blast, blithely rolling down a dirt road as they sing to each other without a care as the camera pans out to reveal a truck bed filled with seemingly purloined cash and the writhing body of a man in a dirty white tank top and jeans with a burlap sack over his head.
Eagle-eyed fans noted that the new video appears to be a call-back to the original “Please Please Please” clip that starred Carpenter’s then-boyfriend Saltburn actor Barry Keoghan. In that one, the couple strike up a friendship after getting sprung from jail, before Keoghan goes back to his felonious ways and gets arrested again. Carpenter takes things into her own hands and handcuffs Keoghan — who is, ahem, wearing a white tank top and black jeans — to a chair at the end of that one, taping his mouth shut as he squirms.
By the end of the new video, Carpenter pulls over and shakes her head as the mystery man screams and bangs around in the back of the truck with police lights flashing in the distance. In an Instagram post promoting the new video, Carpenter gushed, “Dolly and me singing in a pickup truck!!!!!! I am so honored to have one of my biggest idols on a song that means so much to me.” Parton returned the sweet favor in a behind-the-scenes video featuring the two women joking about the “dirty words” in the original and how similar their voices sound, with Parton writing, “Turns out, two things can be short and sweet ??”
The expanded version of Carpenter’s album features the new version of “Please Please Please,” as well as the bonus tracks “15 Minutes,” “Couldn’t Make It Any Harder,” “Busy Woman” and “Bad Reviews.”
Check out the “Please Please Please” video below.
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