'We felt so cool.'
Justin Timberlake and one of his *NSYNC bandmates got a little mischievous when they were young. The 39-year-old singer appears on Wednesday's Ellen DeGeneres Show, where he recalls the antics he and Joey Fatone got into shortly after they graduated high school.
"I accidentally broke into Alcatraz one time," he reveals. "I was in a group, *NSYNC... [and] we were shooting a video in the redwoods near San Francisco. We ended up shooting one scene on this pier, directly across from Alcatraz. And at that time, I was watching The Untouchables over and over again. And I was obsessed with the fact that Al Capone... they put him in Alcatraz."
"And I said, 'Who wants to go see Alcatraz with me?' And Joey, who's usually game for anything, he was like, 'I'll go with you,'" Timberlake continues. "But we only had an hour in between when they were setting up a different shot."
The guys caught a lucky break when some firemen came up to them and asked for photos, a request that Timberlake and Fatone happily agreed to... on the condition that the men take them to the famous prison.
"So they take us over. We felt so cool," Timberlake says. "We were on a Coast Guard, fire department boat. We get over there. We realize on the mainland, you're supposed to buy your tickets and then get on the ferry. So we get to the main gate and they're like, 'Tickets, please.'... I was like, 'The guy behind me has the tickets.'"
Timberlake and Fatone ended up sneakily joining a tour that was in progress and had just made their way to Al Capone's cell when they were found out.
"We get a tap on the shoulder and they're like, 'Come with me,'" Timberlake recalls. "And I was like, 'Joe, we are going to go down in history as the dumbest people ever. We got caught breaking into a prison!'"
"They let us go with a warning and, obviously, we had to pay for the tickets," he adds.
Watch the video below for more on *NSYNC.
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