Amid brutal reviews from critics and a “rotten” response from viewers, the new filmic adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous musical “Cats” is performing miserably in theaters. In a recently published interview, the film’s star, singer Taylor Swift, explains why she decided to take on the role, and in the process provides a glimpse of her apparent suspicions that the film might bomb. She also offers some bizarre details about how she had to prepare for the film.
Review aggregating site Rotten Tomatoes gives “Cats” a horrific 17% on its Tomatometer, which measures critics’ responses, and a sub-par 59% audience score. “Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery,” the site warns in its summary of critics’ response.
Many would-be viewers apparently took the warning to heart. Deadline provides a summary of the stunningly bad box office numbers from the film’s opening weekend: “The movie wound up opening below its $10M-$15M projections to $6.5M, and while you can’t expect much business-wise from adult-skewing movies outside of Star Wars before Christmas Day, the audience PostTrak exits of 2 Stars and a C+ CinemaScore indicate a significantly less than Greatest Showman or Mary Poppins Returns box office future (those two holiday films scored A and A- CinemaScores) for the Tom Hooper directed musical.”
In an interview with Variety published Friday, after early reviews had already ravaged the film, Swift explained why she took the role, and appeared to signal that she suspected it might tank.
“You have to dislocate the end result with your experience and you have to commit to doing it only based on what you think the experience will be and if the experience will teach you things that enrich your life,” said Swift. “So that’s exactly what I thought this would be, which is getting to work with the best dancers and performers in the world, getting to perform live on set, getting to work with one of the best directors out there, the most amazing producers and team of Andrew Lloyd Webber and [choreographer] Andy Blankenbuehler. What more could I possibly ask for in an experience? And so that was what made me immediately commit.”
She also described what was involved in preparing for the role, including having to go to “cat school.”
“We would literally do hours on end of barefoot crawling on the floor, hissing at each other,” said the singer and songwriter. “We learned about cat instincts and the way they carry themselves and the way that they process information, the way they see the world, the way they move.”
“What’s strange is from the very beginning of the whole process, everyone on the director/choreography side of it had decided that we weren’t going to be crawling all the time and we weren’t going to be walking all the time,” she continued. “We were going to be hybrids in both our appearance and our behavior and movement. Which was so funny because you’d walk on set one day and they’d be like, ‘Oh we have to redo the choreography! It’s a little too human today. We need to make it more cat today.’ Or they’d be like, ‘It’s a little too cat and not enough dance, so we need to dial back the cat and make it more dance.'”
The star added that “regardless of what the end result is, there’s just never been a movie made like this, which is why it was so fun to be a part of.”
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