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The actor appeared alongside his ‘Dead Poets Society’ co-star and friend for the music video from Swift’s newest album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department.’
By Lexy Perez
Associate Editor
Josh Charles thought Ethan Hawke was punking him when he told him about appearing in Taylor Swift‘s new music video.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the Dead Poets Society star reflected on his surprise role in Swift’s “Fortnight” music video, the first single of her recent album, The Tortured Poets Department.
“It was a really strange thing. Taylor knows Ethan’s daughter Maya and reached out to her. The title of the album, [is] obviously The Tortured Poets Department, and so I think it’s a little tip of the cap to Dead Poets Society, other tortured poets. She probably had this idea [that] it’d be interesting for us to be in the video,” Charles told Fallon of how his and Hawke’s appearances came to be.
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But when Hawke reached out to him, Charles didn’t believe him at first: “Ethan reached out to me and once I got over thinking he was punking me — When he first called me I said, ‘Dude, are you bullshitting me right now?’”
Ultimately he realized that Hawke’s “not that guy” to joke like that, and he thought it was a “fun idea.”
Swift wrote and directed the video, which also stars the song’s featured artist Post Malone. In the video, Hawke and Charles appear as two scientists, running tests on Swift’s character. When reflecting on how the singer-songwriter is in the director’s chair, Charles says she was his “favorite kind of director.”
“She’s an incredible director, my favorite kind of director because she knows what she wants. When she’s got it, she’s got it,” he says.
“I was already a fan of her music but if any of you ever get to meet her, your fandom for her will just go up through the roof. She’s just such a genuine, cool, approachable person. And that’s nice to see because that’s not always the case,” he added.
Charles also quipped that he and Hawke were “sworn to secrecy” about their surprise appearance and he definitely didn’t tell his kids because they’re “blabber mouths.”
Hawke also reflected on starring in the video while appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “For Josh and I, we laughed ourselves silly the whole day. We felt like the biggest rock stars in the world.”
Following the release of the album, Swift explained the meaning of some songs on Tortured Poets, including “Fortnight,” in a track-by-track experience for Amazon Music.
Of “Fortnight,” she said the song’s theme was centered on “fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say but it’s that kind of album,” she said. “It’s about a traumatic, artistic tragic kind of take on love and loss. ‘Fortnight,’ I always imagined that it took place in this American town where the American dream you thought would happen to you didn’t. You ended up not with the person that you loved and now you just have to live with that everyday, wondering what would’ve been maybe seeing them out. And that’s a pretty tragic concept really so I was just writing from that perspective.”
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