Since Tom Hooper’s Cats curdled into an unprecedented box office bomb this past December — not to mention a critical failure and future midnight movie contender — the majority of its all-star cast has done their best to distance themselves from the film. James Corden even claimed to have never seen Cats in its entirety.
But not Taylor Swift. In an interview with Variety published on Tuesday, the pop star defended the film just before her appearance at the Golden Globes, where the song she wrote for Cats, “Beautiful Ghosts,” was nominated but did not win. (Originally expected to be a Best Original Song frontrunner at the Oscars, “Beautiful Ghosts” wasn’t even shortlisted this year.)
“I’m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,” Swift said. “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 is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, which will premiere opening night (January 23rd) at the Sundance Film Festival before launching January 31st on streaming. The film will offer an inside look into the making of Swift’s most recent album, Lover, as well as her recent political statements, such as her statement urging Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn to support the Equality Act. According to Variety, the movie includes a scene where Swift argues with her father and other members of her team over whether or not to release it.
Miss Americana will also include a previously unheard song by Swift, called “Only the Young,” about the disillusionment that people of Swift’s generation feel toward electoral politics. (“You did all that you could do/The game was rigged, the ref got tricked/The wrong ones think they’re right/We were outnumbered — this time.”)
“[W]ith the election results, I loved how she channeled so many of her thoughts and feelings into ‘Only the Young,’” Miss Americana Lana Wilson told Variety. “It was a great way to kind of show how stuff that happens in her life goes directly into the songs; you get to witness that in both cases.”