Taylor Swift’s disastrous Les Misérables audition with Eddie Redmayne sounds like our worst nightmare

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 favourite 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!

Universal Pictures

But the superstar songstress shouldn’t have fretted because The Good Nurse actor Eddie was also nervous while shooting for the screen test with Taylor because of his issues.

“I thought we would just be singing off each other – I didn’t know we would be in each other’s arms,” Eddie hilariously explained. “My overriding memory of it is that I had had pizza and garlic dough balls beforehand, and all I could think about was my garlic breath while Taylor was dying in my arms, and I was trying to show emotion.”

Unfortunately for Taylor, she bagged neither the role of Éponine nor Cosette, which later went to Samantha Barks and Amanda Seyfried. The country-turned-pop singer went on to showcase her acting chops in films such as Cats and Amsterdam.

In the meantime, we’re still pretty busy jamming out to the tunes on Taylor Swift’s new album, Midnights!