Advertisement
In October 2022, Taylor Swift spilled all the tea about her “nightmare” audition on The Graham Norton Show, and trust us, it’s a wild ride. Turns out, she was up for two roles: Cosette and Éponine. While her look screamed Cosette, her voice leaned more Éponine. Even Swift admitted, “I wasn’t going to get the role.” Still, the chance to audition alongside her fave, Eddie Redmayne, was too good to skip.
So, she flew to London for a screen test—and got hit with 19th-century reality. “When I got there, they put me in full 19th-century street urchin costume and told me they were going to paint my teeth brown, and I was like, ‘You are going to do that after I meet Eddie Redmayne, right?” she said. Yep, it was as awkward as it sounds.
Swift, who described the experience as a nightmare, said she was practically unrecognizable, feeling more “like death” than a Broadway-ready ingénue. So when she finally met Redmayne, she was so self-conscious she didn’t even want to open her mouth to speak. Redmayne, who had already been cast as Marius, wasn’t expecting things to go quite like this. He said, “I thought we would just be singing off each other—I didn’t know we would be in each other’s arms.”
Advertisement
