Taylor Swift ‘Miss Americana’: 10 Revelations About Grammys, Kanye and More
Taylor Swift fans are getting an unprecedented look into the singer’s pop career, personal life and psyche with the documentary Miss Americana, which Netflix released on Friday, January 31.
“Miss Americana is a raw and emotionally revealing look at Taylor Swift, one of the most iconic artists of our time, during a transformational period in her life,” the streaming platform teased in a press release. “The film tells the story of Swift navigating the difference between who the world wants her to be, and who she wants to be. Director Lana Wilson offers a luminous and multifaceted window into a global superstar learning to embrace her role not only as a songwriter and performer, but as a woman harnessing the full power of her voice.”
In the 85-minute film, which premiered on the opening night at Sundance on January 23, the 10-time Grammy winner gets candid about her life in the spotlight, her creative process, her ongoing feud with Kanye West, her legal and political upheavals and — briefly — her relationship with boyfriend Joe Alwyn.
“When I started filming, it was before she’d come out politically,” Wilson told Variety earlier this month. “She knew that she was coming out of a very dark period, and wanted collaborate on something that captured what she was going through and that was really raw and honest and emotionally intimate.”
Scroll down for 10 revelations from the documentary.
Listen on Spotify to Watch With Us to hear more about your favorite shows and for the latest TV news!
“If I don’t beat everything I’ve done, it’s seen as a colossal failure,” she tells her team in the doc as they meet to discuss plans for her 2019 album, Lover.
Matt Baron/Shutterstock
The news that her 2017 album, Reputation, didn’t get Grammy nominations in any of the major categories seems to only faze Swift for a moment. “This is good, this is fine,” she responds. “I need to make a better record. I’m making a better record.”
Carlos Piaggio/Shutterstock
“The process is so dehumanizing,” she says, looking back at her 2017 lawsuit against radio show host David Mueller for groping her butt during a photo op. “There were seven witnesses and a photo. What happens when you get raped and it’s your word against his?”
Stephen Lovekin/Shutterstock
In the documentary, the singer vows to “remove the masking tape from my mouth” about her politics after her sexual assault trial, but she argues with her team about whether to endorse a candidate for the 2018 midterms, as she ultimately did in October of that year. Her team warns her that she would cut her fanbase in half, and her father is worried about her safety, but Swift is determined. “I need to be on the right side of history,” she says.
Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock
“I tend to get triggered by something, whether it’s a picture of me where I feel like my tummy looked too big, or someone said that I looked pregnant, and that will trigger me to just starve a little bit. Just stop eating,” Swift says in the doc. “I don’t think you know you’re doing it when you do it gradually. You don’t ever say, ‘I have an eating disorder’ but you count everything you eat.” Her mother’s cancer diagnosis was a wakeup call, though, and she has gone from a size double zero to a size six.
Shutterstock
When Swift won the category in 2016 for 1989, she remembers thinking, “Oh, my God, that was all you wanted. What now? I don’t have a partner who I climbed this mountain with who I can high-five. Shouldn’t I have someone I can call?”
Mike Nelson/EPA/Shutterstock
“For someone who built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for you, the whole crowd booing is a pretty formative experience,” the “You Need to Calm Down” performer says, reflecting on Kanye West crashing her 2009 VMAs acceptance speech. “That was the catalyst for a lot of psychological paths I went down. Not all of them were beneficial.”
Jason Decrow/AP/Shutterstock
In the doc, Swift reflects on withdrawing from the spotlight amid her feud with West, 42, and his wife, Kim Kardashian. “When people decided I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person, that was the one that I couldn’t really bounce back from, because my whole life was centered around it,” she explains.
Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock
Swift doesn’t name Alwyn, 28, in the film but does say that she fell in love with “someone who had a really wonderful, normal, balanced kind of life.” Plus, Alwyn is presumably behind the camera when Swift mouths “I love you” while singing “Call It What You Want.”
Netflix/Giphy
The pop star reveals during a Lover recording session that she hadn’t tried burritos “until, like, two years ago.”
imageSPACE/Shutterstock
Comments
Post a Comment