Graham Norton has disclosed the one demand Taylor Swift made when she joined his BBC show line-up late last October. The chart-topping singer, who recently married, appeared on The Graham Norton Show to promote her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. Norton explained in a new interview with GQ that Swift was a very last-minute booking.
Swift's condition for appearing
Norton told GQ: 'The show was fully booked. So we thought, “We’re going to have to bump somebody.” Word came back from Taylor: no one must be bumped.' The host added that it turned out to be a good show to be on because everyone ended up in the Opalite music video.
The full roster of Norton’s sofa from that Friday night featured in the track’s music video, which dropped in February. The list included Irish actor Cillian Murphy, Lewis Capaldi, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, and Jodie Turner-Smith.
Music video cameo inspiration
It was during the Norton interview that Swift decided to cast her sofa companions in her next project. According to Swift, Domhnall 'made a light-hearted joke about wanting to be in one of [her] music videos', which led her to be 'instantly struck with an idea'. She wrote: 'I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too.' She described Norton as 'insanely charismatic and loveable'.
Swift added: 'Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90s with us and help with this video.' She noted she 'got ridiculously lucky with the group [she] was paired with, as they were 'all people whose work [she’s] admired from afar'.
Wedding invitation and controversy
Following the sofa appearance, Swift invited Norton to her wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York, an event that both grabbed headlines and courted controversy.
