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No Strings Attached Turns 20: On Set of It’s Gonna Be Me (Flashback)

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Twenty years on, *NSYNC’s toy-store fantasy still holds up as one of pop’s most inventive music videos.

Entertainment Tonight marked the 20th anniversary of *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, released March 21, 2000, by digging up archival footage from the set of “It’s Gonna Be Me,” the album’s chart-topping follow-up single to “Bye Bye Bye.” The flashback catches Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick between takes, working through choreography built to look like stiff, mechanical toy movement before snapping into their usual synchronized routines.

• “It’s Gonna Be Me,” written by Swedish hitmakers Max Martin, Rami Yacoub and Andreas Carlsson, became *NSYNC’s only number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Director Wayne Isham shot the video on location in Los Angeles in spring 2000, casting the five members as boxed action figures competing to be picked off a toy store shelf by a customer played by model Kim Smith.
• The toy-and-doll concept directly extended the album’s marionette artwork, a visual metaphor for the group breaking free of its prior management and record label disputes.

A Toy Store Set Built Around a Rescue Plot

The video’s storyline had the five members packaged as action figures, battling rival toy soldiers and angling to catch the eye of a shopper before she walks past. It’s a simple setup, but it gave Isham room to stage the group as literal products on a shelf — a wink at their real-life status as the most marketed boy band on the planet at the time. Between setups, the ET cameras caught the guys loosening up, laughing through the robotic blocking, then flipping into full pop-star mode the moment the cameras rolled for the dance breaks.

Wayne Isham’s Elaborate Production

Isham, who had already built a reputation shooting big-budget videos for rock and pop acts alike, treated the toy store like a full soundstage production rather than a novelty gimmick. The behind-the-scenes footage shows the scale of it — packaging design, shelving, lighting rigs built to make five grown men look shrink-wrapped and shelf-ready. It’s the kind of concept that could have looked cheap in lesser hands; instead it became one of the signature images of *NSYNC’s imperial run.

Boxed, plastic and dancing anyway — that was the joke, and it worked.

The Song That Made *NSYNC’s Only No. 1

Despite the group’s run of hits, “It’s Gonna Be Me” stands alone as *NSYNC’s sole Billboard Hot 100 number-one. That’s a fact worth sitting with given how dominant the band was across No Strings Attached and the singles that followed — “Bye Bye Bye” among them — none of which matched this one’s chart peak. Fans looking to revisit that broader chapter of turn-of-the-millennium pop can find plenty more from the era logged in the archives of the biggest pop stories of the period.

Dolls, Marionettes and Cutting Strings

The action-figure premise wasn’t a random costume choice — it tied straight back to the album’s title and cover art, which leaned on puppet and marionette imagery to represent *NSYNC severing ties with the management and label arrangements that had boxed them in creatively. Packaging the group as literal toys for “It’s Gonna Be Me” pushed that idea further, turning the metaphor into something playful enough for MTV rotation while still carrying the same subtext. It’s the kind of layered concept that helps explain why Timberlake’s post-*NSYNC arc, later chronicled across retrospectives of pop’s biggest breakout stars, started from such a visible launching pad.

Two decades later, the toy-store bit is still the image most people picture when “It’s Gonna Be Me” comes on — five guys stuck on a shelf, breaking free right on cue for the chorus. ET’s flashback didn’t need to dress it up; the footage of Timberlake and company cracking up between robotic poses does that work on its own.