Later this year Taylor Swift will star as a cat in Cats, in a movie adaptation of a play about cats. The more observant among you will have realised that Swift is not actually a cat and this might be a problem. After all, there are plenty of cat performers out there and surely any roles that arise should be given to an actual feline, and not a rich white woman pretending to be a cat.
To head off any potential controversies down the line, Swift has put a plan of action into place. Not only has she just released a new music video that’s full of cats – nice try, but “some of my best friends are cats” isn’t exactly going to cut it in 2019 – but she’s also revealed that she attended something called cat school to prepare herself for the part.
“I went to cat school on set,” Swift told Time, where she “learned how to be as much like a cat as I possibly could”. See, cats? She’s doing the work. She wants her musical cat to be authentic to the real cat experience. Her revelation demonstrates that she is a true cat ally and should be treated as such.
Swift didn’t do a great job of explaining what cat school is. There’s a chance that it’s comprised of an out-of-work drama teacher standing near the snack table teaching a bunch of disinterested actors how to convincingly lick their own hands.
But I hope that isn’t the case. Swift is a woman who commits to every role, whether it’s twerking in a music video or pretending to be in love with Tom Hiddleston, so you’d hope that she put the same effort into learning the internal motivations of a cat. Hopefully, come the Cats DVD release, there will be footage of the cat school and we’ll see Swift learning how to walk on fence, fatally maul a frog and leave it on a rug and plunge her fingernails into the thighs of someone who just wants to be friends.
Maybe she’ll go further. Maybe it taught her how to internalise the cat mindset, by being truly indifferent to all human displays of affection and waltzing around doing whatever she wanted without acknowledging the people who feed her, keep her warm and pay for her immunisations. God, I hate cats.
We also shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this cat school revelation is a manifestation of the non-actor’s insecurity. After all, until now Swift’s entire screen output has consisted of a bit-part voice role in a disappointing Dr Seuss adaptation, a bit-part in an ensemble containing nothing but bit-parts, two TV cameos and a bit-part in Meryl Streep’s worst film, The Giver.
There’s a chance that Swift has overdone her preparation to prove that she can handle a role like this. There’s a long tradition of musicians indulging in this behaviour, from 50 Cent adopting a liquid diet to star in a drama nobody saw to Jared Leto drinking pints of microwaved ice cream, soy sauce and olive oil to star in a drama no one watched.
Really, you should be asking yourself whether any of Swift’s co-stars also attended cat school? Did Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Sir Ian McKellen or Dame Judi Dench go? If they did, and only if they did, should we give this story any weight.
Nevertheless, we won’t know the effects it had on Swift until Cats’ release in December, when we’ll see her playing *checks notes* a cat who largely exists to describe another cat, in a song about a cat, in a film about cats, based on a play about cats, based on a book about cats. But let’s just take her word for it.
