“I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience,” the superstar said of her appearance in Tom Hooper’s notorious musical flop.
No bad movie captured the imagination last year like Cats, director Tom Hooper’s fiasco of “digital fur technology” and at least one digitally removed bulge (among other mysteries). But while the film may be one of the most widely discussed flops in recent memory, at least one of its many famous cast members has no regrets about her appearance: Taylor Swift.
“I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,” Swift, who affected a British accent to play Bombalurina in the film, told Variety in a new interview. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.”
While this might sound like hindsight and rationalization, her comments are in keeping with what Swift has said about the film before. Speaking to Variety late last year, Swift said that after auditioning to play Éponine in Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables—and losing the role to Samantha Barks—she added working with the King’s Speech filmmaker to her dream board. When he called for Cats, she immediately said yes.
“You have to dislocate the end result with your experience, and you have to commit to doing it only based on what you think the experience will be, and if the experience will teach you things that enrich your life,” Swift said at the time. “So that’s exactly what I thought this would be.”
Based on Lloyd Webber’s blockbuster musical, Cats was a costly miss for Universal, which could reportedly lose $100 million on the production. Swift was among numerous major stars to appear in the film, including Dame Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, Sir Ian McKellen, Rebel Wilson, James Corden, and Jason Derulo. As part of her contribution to the finished product, Swift cowrote the song “Beautiful Ghosts” with Lloyd Webber, which netted her a best-song nomination at the Golden Globe Awards earlier this month. (Swift lost in the category to Elton John’s original number from Rocketman.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cats was also left empty-pawed after last week’s Oscar nominations.
As for Swift, she’s now gearing up for her first Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival before hitting Netflix at the end of the month. And don’t expect her turn in Cats to be her final film performance before ascending to the Heaviside Layer, either: When asked previously if she wanted to act in more movies, Swift said “sure” before adding, of Cats, “This was for me a really special, strange, weird, exciting experience to get to have. And if there was something that came up that was really interesting in a different way, that would be cool.”
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