Taylor Swift casts ‘insanely attractive and lovable’ Graham Norton in music video | Taylor Swift

Graham Norton’s chat show has long been the subject of fascination with American stars, awed by their combined star power, glasses of wine and Norton’s quick-witted, saucy rep – and now Taylor Swift has taken that fandom to another level.

Norton was cast in the music video for Opalite, the second single from her album The Life of a Showgirl to receive the music video treatment after The Fate of Ophelia. In fact, it’s not just Norton, but also stars from the guest list who sat alongside Swift when she appeared in October 2025: actors Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, and fellow musician Lewis Capaldi.

Produced in a ’90s aesthetic, this bizarre fantasy video is written and directed by Swift. Her lone character befriends a pet rock, while Gleeson’s lone character has a similar friendship with a cactus, before a magical substance – the spray on opalite – brings the two together. Norton appears as a salesman selling Opalite, Turner-Smith plays a fitness trainer, and Lee stars as Swift as a fictional MTV singer-songwriter. Capaldi plays a mall photographer, while the final guest that week, Cillian Murphy, does not appear in the video but appears as a billboard image and provides a voiceover.

“Thriller of a lifetime and the hardest secret I’ve ever had to keep! Thank you, thank you,” Norton wrote on Instagram.

Introducing the video, Swift described Norton as “an insanely attractive and likable person” and said of the October show: “I remember being ridiculously lucky with the group I was with… I was immediately struck by the *idea*.”

“And so a week later [Gleeson] I received an email script I wrote for the Opalite video, where he was starring. I thought it would be weird if all of our fellow guests on The Graham Norton Show that night, including Graham himself, would be part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and not mandatory. To my delight, everyone involved in the show made the effort to travel back in time to the 90s with us and help out with this video.

Swift is a relatively regular guest on the long-running BBC chat show, making five appearances since 2013, sitting alongside the likes of Bono and John Cleese. Her casting as Norton is evidence of his growing transatlantic fame: clips from his show are frequently circulated in the US, and he himself has appeared on Seth Meyers’ US talk show.

Opalite already reached number two in the UK charts when it was first released, but is likely to rise again in next week’s chart from its current position of number 15.

The video is available on Spotify and Apple Music, and will appear on YouTube on Sunday.