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Graham Norton’s chatshow has long been an object of fascination for American stars, wowed by its combined star wattage, glasses of wine and Norton’s own quick-witted, lightly saucy repartee – and Taylor Swift has now taken that fandom to another level.
Norton has been cast in the music video for Opalite, the second single from her album The Life of a Showgirl to receive music video treatment after The Fate of Ophelia. Not only Norton, in fact, but the stars from the guest lineup who sat alongside Swift when she appeared in October 2025: actors Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee and Jodie Turner-Smith, and fellow chart-topping musician Lewis Capaldi.
The whimsical, fantastical video, produced with a retro 90s aesthetic, is written and directed by Swift. Her lonely character befriends a pet rock, while Gleeson’s equally lonely 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 hawking a reverse serum, Nope-alite, while Turner-Smith plays a fitness instructor, and Lee mimes along to Swift’s song as a fictional singer-songwriter on MTV. Capaldi plays a mall photographer, while the final guest that week, Cillian Murphy, does not act in the video but appears as a billboard image and provides a voiceover.
“The thrill 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 called Norton “insanely charismatic and lovable” and said of the October show: “I remember thinking I got ridiculously lucky with the group I was paired with … I was instantly struck with an *idea*.
“And so a week later [Gleeson] received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video.”
Swift is a relatively regular guest on Norton’s long-running BBC chatshow, appearing five times since 2013, sitting alongside the likes of Bono and John Cleese. Her casting of Norton is a demonstration of his growing transatlantic cachet: clips from his show frequently go viral in the US, and he has himself appeared on Seth Meyers’ US talkshow.
Opalite had already reached as high as No 2 in the UK charts when it was first released, but it is likely to shoot up again in next week’s chart from its current position of No 15.
The video is available on Spotify and Apple Music, and will appear on YouTube on Sunday.
