The producer of Ryan Gosling‘s new action comedy The Fall Guy has revealed how Taylor Swift‘s song ‘All Too Well’ appeared in the film.
Directed by David Leitch (Bullet Train), the film follows a stuntman (Gosling) who is working on his ex-girlfriend’s (Emily Blunt) directorial debut, only to find himself involved in a conspiracy connected to the film’s leading man.
In the film, it is revealed that Gosling’s character Colt Seavers ghosted Blunt’s Jody Moreno 18 months prior after he sustained a devastating injury to his back and pushed everyone around him away.
After their difficult first day filming together, Colt ends up crying to ‘All Too Well’ in his car. Jody then sees him and taps on his window, asking: “Have you been crying to Taylor Swift?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” he replies.
“We were at a test screening, and a major Swiftie raised her hand and said, ‘That was the perfect use of a Taylor cue. It was equally emotional and hilarious,’” producer Emily McCormick told Vanity Fair. “It was the biggest praise I’ve ever gotten. I mean, it was almost as amazing as Steven Spielberg saying he likes the film.”
‘All Too Well’ was written into the script and it was McCormick who convinced Leitch, who is her husband, to use it. “It was not written in, and when we were shooting, David had a Harry Nilsson song playing. But it felt a little melodramatic to me in a bad way.”
It turned out Gosling was in agreement. “What’s weird is Ryan and I sometimes think of the same things at similar times, and he said, ‘I wonder if we should try Taylor in that scene’. He knows that the love story is modern, fresh, messy, wild, real—all the things that Taylor evokes.”
Leitch was resistant to the idea, but things changed when they both went to see the ‘Eras’ tour in Las Vegas. “She sang the 10-minute version,” McCormick said. “David was blown away. The first time we dropped it in, we knew there was no going back, and we were going to be really upset if we couldn’t get it.”
Swift would have had to approve the use of the song and there were also concerns using it would be too expensive. “So it was very dangerous to fall so deeply in love at that point, but we did.
“Taylor is actually really open to sharing her music with film,” she continued. “We showed her what we had cut, and there were no notes. Thankfully, she’s open to the process, and didn’t price herself so far out of our budget that we weren’t able to include her.”
The pair performed a duet of the song on Saturday Night Live last month to humourously draw a line under their Barbenheimer experiences.
“You know, when you play a character that hard, that long, just letting go feels like a breakup and for processing a breakup, there’s really only one thing that can help – the music of the great Taylor Swift,” said Gosling.
Elsewhere, Blunt recalled the time Swift paid a compliment to her and The Office star John Krasinski’s nine-year-old daughter.
Describing Swift as the “nicest”, the Devil Wears Prada actor explained: “She was so nice to my kids. My oldest kid has just cut all of her hair off, this very short haircut that she was very self-conscious about. And Taylor Swift, goes, ‘God, look at you, you’re just this Sixties beatnik cool kid. I love your style’.”