SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the Season 10 finale of The Masked Singer, including the identity of Cow.
The Masked Singer has officially crowned its Season 10 winner.
The two-hour finale of the Fox singing competition series brought its four finalists — Cow, Sea Queen, Gazelle, and Donut — head-to-head for the Masked trophy. After putting on two very different performances, Cow battled his way to the top.
No one should be too shocked by this win, considering Cow is none other than three-time Grammy winner Ne-Yo. Props to Robin Thicke for figuring it out first.
Ne-Yo had been impressing the judges all season. But no one except for Thicke was able to deduce who might be behind the mask until the final moments of Wednesday’s episode. It wasn’t until a rendition of “Take A Bow” by Rihanna, which Ne-Yo wrote and produced with StarGate, that Nicole Scherzinger also realized who had been right in front of her the entire time.
If anyone was going to figure it out, it would have been Thicke or Scherzinger, Ne-Yo told Deadline. But he didn’t just have to fool the judges. He also had to stand alongside longtime friend Nick Cannon each episode and fly under his radar as well.
Ne-Yo spoke with Deadline ahead of the finale about keeping up the ruse and bringing home the Masked trophy.
DEADLINE: You mentioned you’re a fan of the show. But what prompted you to actually compete?
NE-YO: Nick Cannon is a dear friend of mine. He had no idea that I was doing the show. I actually have to give credit to another dear friend of mine. Her name is Danielle Crawley. She’s a mutual friend of me and Nick, and we were literally just talking about it one day, and she was like, ‘How funny would it be if you went on The Masked Singer and we didn’t tell Nick? Do you think that he would catch you? And I’m like, I don’t know. I might have to go to some extreme lengths for him to not know that it was me, which was actually kind of the reason why I went with the female cow as opposed to a male cow. They actually asked me when it was agreed that I was going to do the show. They gave me the option to be a male cow or a female cow, and I went with the female cow just trying to really go as far as I could to make sure that no one knew it was me. And sure enough, it worked, because he had no idea at all.
DEADLINE: Some of your mannerisms as the Cow were hilarious, especially when you would mess with Nick. He calls you out on it in the finale. How did you get into that character?
NE-YO: I pride myself as an actor in training. You know what I mean? I don’t know if I’m good enough to call myself a full-on actor just yet, but I definitely have love for the craft. And again, I knew I was gonna be a female cow. I grew up in a house full of women — my mother, my sister, my grandmother, and me. So the female mannerisms weren’t that difficult to pick up…it wasn’t difficult at all to develop the character. But yeah, I was messing with Nick just because it was so funny to me that he did not know who I was.
DEADLINE: Throughout the competition, you really experimented with a lot of different genres. I know that the producers help guide song choices, but how much did you have a role in that?
NE-YO: Yeah, that was definitely done on purpose. My voice is pretty distinctive. It’s very hard for me to disguise my singing voice. I knew that if anybody was going to catch me that will be how. I can disguise my speaking voice. I can’t disguise my singing voice. So I tried to do songs that kind of step outside of my wheelhouse a little bit, songs that you probably wouldn’t expect Ne-Yo to sing, and I guess it worked.
DEADLINE: How did you decide to perform “Take A Bow” for the finale?
NE-YO: ‘Take A Bow’ was a decision of myself and the producers combined. We wanted to do, one of the last performances, kind of like a final clue as to who I was. Even then some of the judges were just not convinced it was me.
DEADLINE: Robin and Nicole did guess your identity. Were you expecting that?
NE-YO: Robin and Nicole, I actually have personal relationships with, so I knew if I could get past them, if I could convince them that I was not me, then I’d be okay. I was most concerned with Robin, Nicole, and Nick figuring out who I was. Robin was actually the only judge that was consistently saying, ‘Yeah, I think that’s Ne-Yo.’ Everybody else kind of moved and swayed to potentially other people. But Robin kept it pretty consistent. That worried me. They weren’t really listening to Robin. Nick said at one point, ‘I know it’s not Ne-Yo.’ I knew I was pretty much scot-free from there.
DEADLINE: What did Nick Cannon say to you when he found out it really was you the whole time?
NE-YO: Well, backstage he was like, ‘Okay, so I gotta kill Danielle.’ He knew that our mutual friend was was the one that was responsible for it. And then he was actually really impressed. Because he was like, ‘I really did not know that it was you. I mean the voice kind of, but from the way that you walk to the way that you move, I had no idea.’ He was impressed with my acting chops. He’s like, ‘You got to do some more acting.’ I think I just might.
DEADLINE: I also really enjoyed the group number at the beginning of the finale. Did you all have to rehearse in your costumes to keep your identity hidden?
NE-YO: The security for The Masked Singer is top notch. It is presidential security, like nobody knew who anybody was. If you didn’t have on your costume, we have hoodies that say, ‘don’t talk to me’ across the front of them, with a mirrored visor and gloves. No one knew who anybody else was. For the rehearsals, you were either in your costume or in that hoodie and visor and gloves. They were very, very adamant about it. You literally couldn’t come on set…they were not playing around.
DEADLINE: You said in your finale package that you were really excited about the possibility of winning The Masked Singer. How did it feel to actually take home the trophy?
NE-YO: I’m in some great company, just speaking on the other artists that have won, and it feels good. It feels good to step outside of my own shoes for a minute. I never expected to step into the female cow shoes but it did feel good to just step away from from the Ne-Yo dynamic for a second and just just do something else. Above anything else, I had so much fun with this. I really truly did. I’d do it again. If I felt like I could get away with it, I would absolutely do it again.
