Lance Bass and Joey Fatone Sipped Jack and Coke Onstage at Every NSYNC Tour Finale

The Confession Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed

During a press junket for their new E! series Cocktail Wars, Bass and Fatone told Decider something they claim to have never shared publicly before. At the end of every tour, as NSYNC wound down its final few songs of the run, the two of them were quietly drinking Jack and Coke out of water bottles on stage.

"We've never told this to anyone," Bass said, before immediately telling it to everyone. The ritual was apparently limited to just the last songs of the last show of each tour, which Fatone was quick to clarify, seemingly aware that context matters here. "Just the last few songs. It wasn't during the whole show or anything."

The other members of NSYNC found out and were, to use the clinical term, not pleased. "Then the guys got kind of mad at us," Bass recalled. "They were like, 'You shouldn't do that.'" Which is a sentence that was apparently said to two grown men by other grown men, mid-boyband, in front of thousands of screaming fans.

Their Defense Is Genuinely Airtight

Here is the thing about Bass and Fatone's rebuttal to their bandmates' complaints, and I say this without a shred of irony: it is actually pretty good. "Did we perform every day? Yeah. Were we present? Yeah," Fatone said. Bass finished the argument with the kill shot: "Did we have any leads in any songs? No."

This is correct. NSYNC was, famously, Justin Timberlake and four other guys. If you are one of the four other guys and you choose to sip whiskey during the final performance of a six-month world tour, you are arguably not affecting anyone's experience of the music. The argument holds.

Fatone put it even more plainly: "Was there any pressure? Nah." You cannot argue with that. You simply cannot.

Now They Host a Cocktail Show, Because Of Course They Do

Cocktail Wars premiered on E! with Bass and Fatone as hosts, which, given this revelation, now makes complete narrative sense. The show features three mixologists competing each episode for $10,000, with beverage consultant Melissa Brooke helping the hosts understand what they are actually tasting. Guest judges this season include Rachel Maddow, Lauren Graham, Seth Green, and Melissa Gorga, which is a celebrity lineup that exists nowhere else on earth.

Fatone said E! approached Bass first, then came to him. His initial answer was no. "When I said no, they said, 'Well, you have no choice,'" Fatone told Decider, laughing. He is clearly joking, but the mental image of a network executive telling Joey Fatone he has no choice about hosting a cocktail show is one of the more surreal things available to the human imagination.

Both of them admitted they walked into production thinking they knew a reasonable amount about cocktails and walked out knowing they had been extremely wrong. "At the start of all this, we kind of thought we knew what we were talking about," Bass said. "We learned quickly that we did not."

Lance Bass, Type 1 Diabetes, and a Whole Team of People Watching His Blood Sugar

There is a genuinely earnest thread running through all the boozy chaos here. Bass has Type 1 diabetes and documents managing the condition publicly. Filming a cocktail competition show, where tasting is literally the job, required serious logistical coordination. According to Bass, mixers in cocktails are the main blood sugar danger, not straight spirits, so he spent the season learning which drinks he could actually have without a glucose spike.

"Now certain drinks, like a margarita or a pina colada, are gonna kill me," Bass said, before clarifying that he means metabolically, not literally, though the honesty is appreciated. The production had a whole team monitoring his levels throughout filming. Fatone said Bass's manager was texting from a plane asking them to check his numbers.

"Every time we took a sip, someone would be checking his levels," Fatone said. Bass ended the whole explanation with a message aimed directly at kids living with Type 1 diabetes: "See kids, even with diabetes, you can do anything. You can host a cocktail show." Whatever you think about celebrity press junkets, that one lands.

The Justin Timberlake Question Hanging in the Air

Decider's interview also touched on why one of Bass's oldest friends did not appear as a guest judge this season. The article as published does not include the full answer, cutting off mid-sentence in the transcript. Whether that is an editorial decision, a website formatting issue, or the universe protecting certain friendships from scrutiny is unclear.

What is clear is that Cocktail Wars exists, Lance Bass and Joey Fatone are hosting it, and they would like you to know that they have always, on some level, been cocktail people. The Jack and Coke water bottles were not a lapse in judgment. They were foreshadowing.