Taylor Swift’s memory of auditioning for a role in the 2012 film “Les Misérables” with Eddie Redmayne makes her take a deep sigh — of embarrassment.
“I once died in his arms in a screen test,” she said on Friday’s “The Graham Norton Show” as Redmayne sat at her side and laughed.
At the time, a 22-year-old Swift was already working her way to superstardom with the release of “Red” and had a few auditions for two roles in the epic musical, Cosette and Éponine. Unfortunately, it didn’t go quite as she had hoped. “I think it had been established I had more of the look of Cosette and the range vocally of Éponine, so it was established I was there for a good time, not a long time. I wasn’t going to get the role,” Swift said with a smile.
Nevertheless, she was called to England to do a screen test with Redmayne, who had already been cast as Marius Pontmercy. She thought, “’This seems like an experience I want to have in my life.’ [Eddie’s] one of my favorite actors. You’re so ridiculously talented. And I was like, ‘Yeah I’ll go to London.’”
But when she got there, they wanted her to be fully in character as a 19th-century street urchin, which meant costume, brown teeth and dark circles under her eyes like Éponine was near death.
“They were like, ‘We’re actually going to paint your teeth brown for this,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘You are going to 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.’” But no such luck.
“This has immediately become a nightmare for me,” she joked, adding that she didn’t open her mouth to talk with him because of the hideous colorization on her usually pearly whites. But as it turned out, Redmayne had only one thing in mind as he held her close for the screen test – the garlic dough balls he had for lunch.
“I thought we’d just be singing off each other,” he recalled. “And they [instead] had us on the floor singing sweet nothings to each other, and all I knew is that I just had garlic bread. I was trying to show emotion while also, at the same time, not punish you.”
“You were weeping and I thought it was just because of how I looked,” Swift grinned. “Like, ‘I have to be close to her right now.’”
Check out the video at the top.
