Gina Rodriguez’s heartbreaking 2019 Netflix movie Someone Great inspired Taylor Swift’s new Lover track Death By a Thousand Cuts.
The pop star admits she was so touched by the film, about a career-conscious girl getting over a bad break-up, she turned it into a song, which fans are raving about online after her new album dropped overnight.
“There’s something that you get from watching a good story take place,” Taylor told radio host Elvis Duran on Friday (August 23, 2019). “I watched this movie on Netflix called Someone Great; it’s this amazing, like, well done romantic comedy with heart… It’s about this relationship that ends after, like, eight or nine years.
“I read the synopsis of the movie and it’s like, ‘Girl goes through break-up’, and, ‘Girl goes on trip with her girlfriends…’ and I’m reading this and I’m like, the movie’s gonna be like, ‘Get over him, girl, he’s a jerk. Let’s take shots!’ And I was like, ‘I’m down! Let’s watch this movie’. And then you turn it on and it’s this gut punch… It’s a movie about how she has to end this relationship that she didn’t want to end, because she’s still in love with the person, but they just grew apart – and he’s not a jerk. It’s just sad… It’s deeply, deeply upsetting.”
Taylor admitted she cried watching the movie, which stayed with her for days.
“For, like, about a week I start waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario… I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m writing a break-up song!’ I had all these lyrics in my head, based on the dynamics of these characters.”
And her links to the movie didn’t end there – after Taylor raved about Someone Great on a TV show, the writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson got in touch via email and told her it was based on a real-life break-up she went through.
“She’s like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for mentioning my movie… It was about my own break-up… While I was moving across the country, the album I had on repeat was (my album) 1989 and specifically a song of yours called Clean’.
“So I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I just wrote a song based on something she made, which she made while listening to something I made!'”
