As you might recall, one of the most ‘whaaaaa?†moments in the first Cats trailer involved Taylor Swift’s character-shoe-wearing Bombalurina sprinkling glittery catnip over the Jellicle Ball attendees out of a rhinestone shaker. You have one person to thank for that scene (well, in addition to the hundreds of hard-working artists and professionals who worked on the film for years) and that person is — you guessed it — Taylor Swift’s dad, Scott.
Apparently, Cats director Tom Hooper visited Taylor in Nashville earlier this year to show her the design of the film’s cat people. While spending time in the singer’s management office, her father, “the most social, friendly man in the world†known for blurting ideas in the middle of meetings, pitched Hooper his vision. As Swift explained to Variety Monday, “Dad just pipes up and says, ‘Hey, I got an idea. What if you had a scene where they are all at the Jellicle Ball and they all get catnipped so they all just start going crazy?’ Tom Hooper goes, ‘What’s catnipped?’â€
“All of us are like, ‘You don’t know what catnip is?’†Swift recalled. “We start pulling up all these YouTube videos of cats on catnip. Tom looks at Dad and goes, ‘That’s going to be in the movie. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’ So my dad walks around going, ‘Hey, I’m the reason there’s catnip in the scene.’†A scene we have yet to see, but we have to assume involves cat-people attacking a ceiling fan the size of a school bus in a catnip-fueled kitty freakout.