Taylor Swift Auditioned For A Major Hollywood Musical — And It Went Horribly Wrong

If you've been paying attention to Taylor Swift's career highs over the last few years — and it's hard not to, honestly — you're probably wondering if there's anything the singer-songwriter can't do. In 2024, Swift became the first artist in Grammys history to win the night's biggest prize, album of the year, a whopping four times (that win was for her 2022 album "Midnights" after three previous wins for "Fearless" in 2010, "1989" in 2016, and "folklore" in 2021). In December of that same year, she wrapped up her Eras Tour, which spanned the globe, five continents, and 149 completely sold-out shows ... and when I say "completely sold out," I mean thousands of fans who couldn't get tickets swarmed stadiums and sat on hills near venues just to overhear the three and a half hour experience. 

Swift is one of the best-selling artists of all time (to the point where her charting peers are legends like the Beatles, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson) and has been called a generationally talented songwriter by luminaries like Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, and Carole King. One thing she couldn't do, though? Audition for Tom Hooper's 2012 musical "Les Misérables." During a 2022 appearance on the raucous "The Graham Norton Show" alongside Eddie Redmayne, who went on to play Marius in the movie, Swift admitted that her audition was absolutely awful.

"Basically, I was auditioning for two roles," Swift told Norton, explaining that she considered herself half a contender for two of the musical's lead female roles. "I had the look of Cosette, but I had the range vocally of Éponine, so it was established that I was there for a good time but not for a long time. I wasn't going to get the role," Swift joked. (The blonde, willowy Cosette, who happens to be Marius' love interest, was ultimately played by Amanda Seyfried. Stage veteran Samantha Barks, who previously portrayed Éponine — who's hopelessly in love with Marius — in two productions of "Les Misérables" before, scored that role.)

"But they were like, 'do you want to come to London for one last screen test and you'll get to screen test with Eddie Redmayne?'" Swift said before telling Redmayne that he's one of her favorite actors. "This seems like an experience I want to have in my life," Swift recalled thinking, but when she got to London, she was in for a big surprise. Swift then explained that the team wanted to make her look like Éponine for the screen test, right down to the brown teeth ... and when Redmayne described the character as a "19th century street urchin," Swift agreed before getting into the worst part of the tale.

As Taylor Swift recalled, her screen test for "Les Misérables" was incredibly "realistic" for whatever reason, right down to the dirt on the fictional Éponine's teeth. "So I get there, and they're like, 'Okay, so we really wanna make you look like Éponine,'" Swift said to Norton and the audience. She continued:

"So they were like, 'We're actually gonna paint your teeth brown for this.' And I'm like, 'So you're gonna do that after I meet Eddie Redmayne, right? That's not something you do before, I get to meet people, and then you do the brown teeth.' And they're like, 'Oh, no, everybody's gonna meet you with the brown teeth, and we're gonna do big circles under your eyes, like you're near death,' and I was like, 'This has immediately become a nightmare for me...'"

Swift joked that, when she actually met Eddie Redmayne, she refused to open her mouth ... but Redmayne, who says he was just wearing a tracksuit to the screen test and no realistic makeup at all, said he had his own cause for embarrassment. He'd just been to the British chain Pizza Express, and apparently, he didn't smell great. "I thought we would just be singing off each other—I didn't know we would be in each other's arms," Redmayne admitted. "My overriding memory of it is that I had had pizza and garlic dough balls beforehand, and all I could think about was my garlic breath while Taylor was dying in my arms, and I was trying to show emotion."

"You were weeping," Swift confirmed, speaking to Redmayne's acting prowess before adding a quip: "I thought it was because of how I looked." Swift did not book a role in "Les Misérables," but years later, she appeared in a different project helmed by Tom Hooper ... unfortunately.

Years after her disastrous, dirty-toothed audition for "Les Misérables," Taylor Swift got the "opportunity" to work with Tom Hooper on his next big-screen musical misadventure: "Cats," an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's bizarre and fantastical fever dream where a series of cats introduce themselves until one is granted the privilege to die. (That's the plot, such as it is. I'm not kidding. Look it up.) Swift, who's luckily only in the movie for about one scene, plays "femme fatale" Bombalurina, who's some sort of accomplice to Idris Elba's freaky-looking and evil magical cat Macavity — and she sings one song and leaves. She does get the digital fur technology treatment alongside the rest of the cast, and to say they all look upsetting and jarring is an understatement. Swift's acting roles, with the utmost due respect, are middling at best and disastrous at worst, and sadly, "Cats" falls into the latter category. (Seriously, I'm pretty sure "Cats" is one of the worst movies ever made, and not even in a fun way.)

Still, Swift had nothing but nice things to say about "Cats" in early 2020 while attending the Sundance Film Festival to premiere "Miss Americana," a documentary about her professional and personal growth. "I'm happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie," Swift told Variety. "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."

That, people, is the mark of a true professional ... as is allowing people to paint your teeth brown for a screen test. If you want to watch Swift perform in some glittery and glamorous outfits rather than continuing to imagine her with the brown teeth and undereye circles of a street urchin, "The Eras Tour" concert film is streaming on Disney+ now.