Taylor Swift will be covered in ‘digital fur’ in ‘Cats’

Taylor Swift has opened up about her upcoming performance in Cats, explaining that director Tom Hooper has used digital fur to recreate the “awe factor” of the original musical.

“They add digital fur to us,” explained Swift. “They’re completely human performances. It’s not animated. And it’s not motion capture. It’s somehow this new way that hasn’t been done before. And they’re giving us a tail that moves naturally, and ears and whiskers. It was one of the coolest things I’ve seen.”

Read More: Filming wraps on film version of musical ‘Cats’, starring Taylor Swift and James Corden

Swift, who will play Bombalurina in the big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved musical, also told Entertainment Weekly about her love of the original show and its music.

“One of the things that made Cats so special when it came out in the ’80s was that it was presented in a way people hadn’t seen before.”

This was something that Swift was fully committed to bringing to the big-screen version, and she was eager to know how the film was “going to give people that same awe factor” that made theatre audiences know they were seeing “something completely original.”

“I was like, ‘Are we gonna be in the Lycra catsuits with fur glued to us? Like, what are we talking about here?’”

Read more: Swift and Corden join Cats

That’s when Hooper told Swift about the digital fur. After agreeing to join Swift then dove in and completed her own research for the part, which included going to what she called “cat school” to learn every minute detail about becoming a feline.

“I just fully committed and threw myself into the process and had the most fun. We had this thing called ‘cat school’ that was a class where you could learn about how to create the motions of cats, how to think like they think, how to sense things the way that they do, carry yourself the way a cat would. I learned a lot.”

We’ll see if it was all worth it when Cats is released on December 20, 2019.