The 'Cats' Movie Sent Taylor Swift To Cat School

None of us has seen a single frame of the Cats movie, but the film community seems obsessed with the big screen adaptation of the Broadway musical – for all the wrong reasons. Rather than have the actors dress up in cat costumes like the musical, the movie is employing tech to digitally turn the cast into realistic-looking cat-people. It's either going to look really good, or really bad. Pop icon Taylor Swift, one of the stars of the movie, recently revealed that to prepare for her part, she had to enroll in cat school. How can you not want to see this movie at this point?

Taylor Swift is playing Bombalurina in the Cats movie, and getting into the role required a lot more than slipping on a cat suit. "I was like, 'Are we gonna be in the Lycra catsuits with fur glued to us? Like, what are we talking about here?'" Swift told EW. The answer: no. While pitching Swift on the project, director Tom Hooper showed Swift a demo reel with fur, tails, whiskers and more added in post.

"They add digital fur to us," Swift adds. "They're completely human performances. It's not animated. And it's not motion capture. It's somehow this new way that hasn't been done before. And they're giving us a tail that moves naturally, and ears and whiskers. It was one of the coolest things I've seen."

If you say so, Taylor.

While the cat-features are being added digitally, Swift and her fellow CAsT members still had to learn how to move like a cat. A cat that can also sing and dance. As Swift tells EW:

'I just fully committed and threw myself into the process and had the most fun...We had this thing called 'cat school' that was a class where you could learn about how to create the motions of cats, how to think like they think, how to sense things the way that they do, carry yourself the way a cat would. I learned a lot."

The eventual Cats Blu-ray better contain footage of Swift and company in cat school, that's all I'm going to say.

I'm not a fan of Tom Hooper, and I really wish Hollywood would stop making him their go-to guy for musicals. That said, I'm excited to see Cats, just because everything we've heard about the movie sounds incredibly weird. The prospect of seeing Swift and her fellow actors Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen and more running around with CGI cat-enhancements sounds too weird to miss.

Cats open December 20, 2019.