Taylor Swift’s New “Opalite” Music Video Stars Everyone She Appeared With On ‘The Graham Norton Show’ Last Year
by Ken Partridge · GeniusTaylor Swift has been out of the news for a little while—she wasn’t at the Grammys, and she seemingly has nothing to do with the Super Bowl—but she’s rectified that today by dropping a music video for “Opalite,” off last year’s The Life Of a Showgirl. From now until February 8, the video is only available on Apple Music and Spotify.
In the ’90s-themed clip, Swift plays a lonely woman whose best friend is a rock. Then, thanks to a magical product called Opalite, she levels up her life and meets a dude (played by actor Domnhall Gleeson) who was previously in love with a cactus. Along the way, a bunch of other actors and musicians—Cillian Murphy, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lewis Capaldi, and Graham Norton—make cameos. At the very end of the video, we learn why Swift chose this particular cast of people.
As it happens, they all appeared alongside Swift last year on the U.K. talk show The Graham Norton Show. At one point during Swift’s appearance on the program, Gleeson joked about wanting to appear in a Swift video, and that’s what kicked off the whole thing.
“He was joking!” Swift writes on Instagram. “Except that in that moment during the interview, I was instantly struck with an idea. And so a week later he received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. 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. 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 90’s with us and help with this video.”
You can read all the lyrics to “Opalite“ on Genius now.