Taylor Swift's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Episode Is One Of The Show's Most Disturbing

A common joke amongst Swifties — the very passionate fans of pop star Taylor Swift — is that we're all so lucky that Swift decided to pursue music instead of becoming a serial killer. Obviously, this is tongue-in-cheek and refers to Swift's love of planting cryptic, clever Easter eggs for her fans to find as she gears up for a new announcement or album release, but it's also a nod to her famously well-documented love of crime-centric television. (One of her three cats is named Olivia Benson after Mariska Hargitay's lead detective on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, after all.) This is all to say that it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Swift once guest-starred on an episode of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" — specifically, in the show's ninth season in an episode titled "Turn, Turn, Turn," which aired in 2009.

The episode ostensibly focuses on crime scene investigator Nick Stokes (original cast member George Eads) as he's called to a seedy motel where a murder occurred on his birthday, but Swift's character, Haley Jones, is the thread that ties the whole thing together. In the episode's first scene, Nick finds Haley's body — she's been stabbed — in the parking lot of said motel, which is owned by her parents Mark and Nicole Jones (Geoffrey Blake and Lisa Darr). "Turn, Turn, Turn" then flashes back to one year prior when Nick was investigating a different death at the motel (shouldn't this place get shut down at a certain point?!) and first met Haley, back when she had light brown hair and bangs. The next time Nick is at the motel to deal with yet another crime (the apparent assault of Haley's friend Bree, played by Alessandra Torresani), Haley looks different, with blond curls that look a lot more like Swift's real style at the time. (She was in the midst of promoting her second album, "Fearless," during this era and favored country music-appropriate golden curls.) The third time Nick sees Haley, she's dyed her hair dark brown and is sporting a nose piercing and lip ring for a gothic look. (Also, there's another dead body.)

Why am I talking about Haley's hair so much? Weirdly, it's the key to Swift's character's entire arc — which, even for a show like "CSI," is particularly unsettling.

Frankly, the episode of "CSI" featuring Taylor Swift as Haley Jones is more than a little convoluted plot-wise, but let me break it down for you. Right from the jump, it's clear that Nicole and Mark are very weird — there's an unsettling scene where we're led to believe that perhaps Mark participated in Bree's assault, though he's exonerated in the end — and Nick Stokes eventually learns that before Haley, the couple lost a child who died in the bathtub while the babysitter wasn't paying attention. As it turns out, Haley isn't Nicole and Mark's biological child, and her mother Tanya Carrow (Mim Drew), who happens to be the very babysitter that neglected Nicole and Mark's daughter Melissa, shows up at the motel looking for Haley. Nicole takes the woman out and then, while she's threatening to cut Haley's goth (and final) hairstyle (which resembles a picture of Tanya), she accidentally stabs her adopted daughter in the chest. See? I told you it's convoluted.

Still, Swift apparently loved it. In fact, she actually opened up about the experience to journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis, who once profiled the singer for her first Rolling Stone cover, in interviews that only recently came to light thanks to Grigoriadis' podcast "Infamous" and its Swift-centric series in 2023, which focused on the star's meteoric rise (via People Magazine). Apparently, she was a fan of the franchise. "The character Nick Stokes, it's his crime that he deals with," Swift, who was just 19 at the time of filming, explained. "It was really cool, because he's my favorite character."

"I'm black-haired, have a nose ring, earrings, spikes, combat boots [...]," she continued. "And you end up figuring out that there's this whole back story, and that my parents had a child that ended up dying and I was the second replacement child. And my mom never really loved me [...] and there are so many different intricate storylines that come into play."

There's one person who didn't love this experience, though — Swift's mother Andrea, who has been closely involved with her daughter's career for years and was on set during filming. "My [own] mom was a little freaked out," Swift admitted. "I was open-eye dead, literally had to stare off into nothing and not breathe during the close ups [...] not flinch or anything."

Nowadays, Taylor Swift has stepped away from acting for the most part, which is for the best; she's not terrible at it and is actually pretty good in her "CSI" episode, but after small roles in giant flops like "Amsterdam" and the universally despised adaptation of "Cats," she didn't always choose the best projects. This is genuinely a little funny when you consider that, for quite some time, Swift had a penchant for picking left-field contenders for singles too; for her 2019 album "Lover," she went with the flop "Me!" instead of the absolute bop "Cruel Summer," which remains one of the most baffling decisions of her career to date, "Cats" notwithstanding. She's definitely still performing, though!

In case you didn't hear anything about Swift's Eras Tour because you were in a coma or hiding in a secluded forest or something, the career retrospective tour ran from March 2023 to December 2024 and spanned 149 shows across a whopping five continents, giving Swift the chance to remind everyone of her many talents. Still, she managed to sneak one little acting challenge into the show starting in May 2024 when she debuted a brand new "era" dedicated to the album she had released one month beforehand, titled "The Tortured Poets Department."

After a marching band backs her for the vengeful breakup anthem "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived," Swift "collapses" on stage until two of her dancers, Jan Ravnik and Kameron Saunders, go and fetch her before reviving her and forcing her to change costumes while a vaudeville-style theme plays in the background. With the set mimicking a movie marquee, Swift goes on to sing "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," a song literally about performing on the Eras Tour while dealing with personal strife and drama. It's a cinematic little interlude ... and even though Swift isn't on shows like "CSI" at this point in her massive career, she's certainly still performing.

Swift's episode of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" is streaming on Hulu now, as is the rest of the crime series.