Taylor Swift had a less-than-pleasant screen test with Eddie Redmayne for the 2012 movie Les Misérables*—*and honestly, we can feel her pain.
The singer, who recently set the internet alight with her new album Midnights, reflected on the disastrous audition while appearing on The Graham Norton Show alongside Oscar winner Eddie. “Basically, I was up for two roles,” Taylor explained. “I had the look of Cosette and the range vocally of Éponine, 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.”
Offering further context, the 32-year-old continued: “But they asked if I would like to go to London to do a screen test with Eddie, who is one of my favorite actors, and I thought, ‘This isn’t an experience I am going to get again in my life,’ so I said yes.”
However, once she got to the set of Tom Hooper’s 2012 production, the crew put her in “full 19th-century street urchin costume” before she even had the chance to meet Eddie.
“So I get there, and they’re like, ‘Okay, so we really wanna make you look like Éponine.’ 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…'”
Taylor added that when she eventually met Eddie, she “didn’t open her mouth to speak.” Honestly, we would be mortified, too!
