Taylor Swift recalls disastrous Les Misérables screen test with Eddie Redmayne

There are a handful of names that are widely accepted as being on the long list of Taylor Swift’s ex-lovers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris, etc.). If you’re deep into Swiftie lore, you may know a few other names that were widely rumored to be on the list, like Eddie Redmayne. Swift auditioned for the Les Misérables movie back in the day, and because of this reported interaction, some speculated he inspired a track or two on the Red album.

But the truth of their meeting is apparently much less romantic. “There’s a lot that people don’t know about this story,” Swift clarifies during an appearance alongside Redmayne on The Graham Norton Show. “Basically, I was auditioning for two roles in Les Mis, and I’d done a few auditions and gone to New York, and whatever. And I think it had been established that I had more of a look of Cosette, but I had 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.” (“I’m not sure that’s true,” Redmayne can be heard disagreeing.)

She continues, “But they were like, you know, ‘Do you wanna come to London for one last screen test, and you’ll get to screentest with Eddie Redmayne,’ and I’m like, ‘This seems like an experience I wanna have in my life’—you’re like one of my favorite actors, you’re so ridiculously talented–and I was like, ‘So, yeah, I’ll go to London.’”

When Swift arrived for the screen test, she recalls, they really wanted to make her “look like Eponine,” a “nineteenth-century street urchin” (in Redmayne’s words). “So they’re like, ‘We’re 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?’” she shares.

Alas, they not only browned her teeth but painted dark circles under her eyes so she’d look “near death”: “I was like, ‘This has immediately become a nightmare for me,” Swift remembers, joking that she tried not to open her mouth while speaking when she did finally meet Redmayne.

It wasn’t the Oscar winner’s best day either. “Taylor was dressed fully as Eponine, and I was like, in my tracksuit,” he remembers, and “My overriding memory of it is that I had had pizza and garlic dough balls beforehand… and they had us on the floor, like, singing sweet nothings into each other’s–and all I knew is, I just had garlic breath.”

“It was nice to hear we were both struggling in that moment,” Swift laughs. So perhaps he wasn’t an inspiration for Red, but that terrible audition might have been one of the things that kept her awake in the middle of the night years later when she started to write a new album.