Taylor Swift Recounts ‘Nightmare’ Audition for ‘Les Miserables’ Role

Taylor Swift remembers one audition that didn’t go over too well. The Midnights singer recalled what happened during her audition for the 2012 movie musical Les Misérables and how she was excited to meet Eddie Redmayne, who played Marius. Unfortunately, an unexpected costume change quickly turned the excitement into disappointment.”Basically, I was up for two roles. I had the look of Cosette and the range, vocally, of Éponine,” Swift said during the Oct. 28 episode of The Graham Norton Show via E! Online. “So it was established I was there for a good time but not for a long time—I wasn’t going to get the role.”

She continued, “But, they asked if I would like to go to London to do a screen test with Eddie, who is one of my favourite actors, and I thought ‘This isn’t an experience I am going to get again in my life,’ so I said yes.” Despite the singer’s best efforts, things became a bit embarrassing after she was given a less-than-ideal makeover as a dying Éponine. “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?’ But no, they made me look like death and it became a nightmare,” she revealed. “When I met Eddie I didn’t open my mouth to speak!”

Redmayne, who also appeared on The Graham Norton Show alongside Swift, acknowledged that the moment also had a lasting effect on him. In this case, it wasn’t a wardrobe choice but his ill-fated food choices that caused him to dread the screen test. “I thought we would just be singing off each other,” he explained. “I didn’t know we would be in each other’s arms.” The Fantastic Beasts star added, “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.”

Having auditioned for the role of Éponine in Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Les Misérables and lost out to Samantha Barks, Swift told Variety she added working with the King’s Speech director to her dream board. She immediately said yes when he asked for her in Cats. Critics and viewers lambasted the 2019 film due to its “digital fur technology” along with a laundry list of other missteps and controversies. However, when asked if she had no regrets about her appearance, Swift said, “I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie.” 

Swift, who adopted a British accent to play Bombalurina in the film, told Variety in 2020, “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.” Swift’s comments may come off as] introspection and justification, but they are consistent with what she has said about the film in the past. “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.”