Last night’s hottest premiere wasn’t, as you might assume, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker. While most reasonable industry folks and film critics were visiting a galaxy far, far away in Los Angeles, Tom Hooper was unveiling his furry masterwork to critics and stars in New York. According to Variety, the Cats premiere offered a veritable goldmine of silliness befitting the likes of Stefon: There was a last-minute rush to complete production, tales of “cat school,” a milk bar (with no actual milk), and Jason Derulo.
On the red carpet for the premiere, Hooper revealed that he’d only completed production on Cats mere hours before the screening. “I just put the finishing touches on. So, I’m very happy to be here with it fully finished,” Hooper said. “Let the audience decide, but I think we’ve come a long way since that first trailer.” Post-production efforts on the film were particularly taxing, as Cats utilizes “digital fur technology” (let’s not make this a thing) to transform its actors into cat-people—complete with fur-covered bodies, human-shaped breast lumps, and tails coming out of the place where their buttholes should be. Impressive stuff, truly.
Participating in his own public humiliation, Idris Elba offered rare insight into the cat-acting process:
Elba revealed that the actors went method and enrolled in “cat school” to perfect the craft of playing an animal. The cast had to arrive on set early in the morning for training, which included prowling on their knees, nuzzling each other, smelling each other and rolling around.
The Variety report neglects to confirm whether or not the cast of Cats were also forced to urinate and defecate in litter boxes, though they were clearly at the mercy of the sadistic whims of a director who may or may not be a total maniac. While the stars of Cats drank champagne and martinis from a “milk bar” at the after party, the official Cats Twitter account, possibly operated by a 13-year-old from Tumblr, was slowly becoming unhinged:
Did the Star Wars premiere have Jason Derulo and cat school honor graduate Jennifer Hudson and a thirsty tween Twitter account and the cast of Queer Eye? DIDN’T THINK SO.