When Taylor Swift realised she was replacing another Graham Norton Show guest due to the last-minute nature of her appearance, the singer took matters into her own hands.
The newly married pop star, 36, was a guest on the iconic red sofa in October last year to promote her 12th studio album The Life of a Showgirl.
Swift almost didn’t make it on the BBC show, however, with talk show host Graham Norton recalling that the “Love Story” singer was “a very last-minute booking”.
“The show was fully booked,” he said at a recent GQ event. Norton, 63, explained that the eleventh-hour nature of her appearance meant another guest would have to be moved to another date.
“We thought, ‘We’re going to have to bump somebody,’” said Norton.
Swift, however, had other plans and did not wish for anyone to be excluded on account of her. “Word came back from Taylor: no one must be bumped,” recalled the TV personality.
“And that was a good show to be on because everyone ended up in the ‘Opalite’ music video. Everyone!”
Swift was joined that night on a particularly crowded sofa by Cillian Murphy, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Domhall Gleeson, and Lewis Capaldi. All five celebrities – as well as Norton himself – featured in the music video for Swift’s song “Opalite”. It’s not known which guest was due to be moved to another episode.
Releasing the music video in February 2026, Swift revealed that she had decided to cast her fellow guests after Gleeson made “a light-hearted joke about wanting to be in one of [her] music videos”.
“I was 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.”
“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 said, adding that she “got ridiculously lucky with the group [she] was paired with, as they were ‘all people whose work [she’s] admired from afar.”
Her encounter with Norton – whom she described as “insanely charismatic and loveable” – led to the broadcaster landing an invite to her wedding to NFL star Travis Kelce, which took place at Madison Square Garden on 4 July with official photos still yet to be released by the couple.
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