Who Is Taylor Swift's Brother & What Movies Or TV Shows Have You Seen Him In?
If there's one thing we can count on in this manic, busy world, is that Taylor Swift will apparently always be in the news. Whether she's showing up at a Kansas City Chiefs game to cheer on her maybe-fling Travis Kelce, breaking box-office records with pre-sales for the film version of her game-changing Eras Tour, or getting tipsy and dancing at the MTV Video Music Awards, Swift is constantly making news in some way, shape, or form ... so it might feel like any siblings might wilt in the pop superstar's shadow.
That's actually not the case with Austin Swift, though. While his older sister Taylor is out there conquering the world, the younger Swift works steadily as an actor and producer, and he's even collaborated with the "Cruel Summer" songstress on some of her recent projects. Whether you want to or not, you probably know nearly everything there is to know about Taylor Swift at this point ... so what's the deal with Austin?
Austin Swift never expected to get into acting
Born in 1992 — a few years after his sister, famously born in 1989 — Austin Swift moved to Nashville with his family so that Taylor could pursue her burgeoning country music career, and as he told People Magazine in 2018, he never thought he'd get into acting. "I'm pretty reserved in most circumstances, so it never seemed like it would be a good fit," he told the magazine. "But I kind of got thrust into it and realized that it could be an opportunity to be creative."
Apparently, a production of Luigi Pirandello's pioneering play "Six Characters in Search of an Author" was what helped Swift get into acting while he was attending the University of Notre Dame (Swift graduated in 2015 with a degree in film studies). In that same People interview, he said, "I got really worried I wasn't good enough. It became clear I needed to either buckle down or walk away. I started staying after rehearsals every night and running the whole play by myself, over and over, acting every part until the sun came up. By opening day, it was a different play and I felt like I was a different person." Taylor Swift is a known workaholic; apparently, it runs in the family.
In 2016, Austin Swift kicked off his acting career in earnest
After working as an intern at Lionsgate after graduation, Austin Swift officially made his film debut alongside Pierce Brosnan in the 2016 thriller "I.T.," and his star only rose from there. That same year, Swift showed up in a small role in one of Ben Affleck's films, "Live by Night," which also stars Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldaña, Elle Fanning, and Affleck himself, which tells the story of a man who gets involved with the mob in New York in the 1920s.
In 2018, he popped up in "Cover Versions" with "Insatiable" star Debby Ryan, and the year after that, an indie movie called "Braking for Whales" that also featured "Harry Potter" alum Tom Felton. So what about the small screen? Swift's resume there is short, but could possibly grow eventually; in 2017, he appeared on one episode of Billy Ray Cyrus' sitcom "Still the King" and two episodes of the short-lived political comedy "Embeds."
We Summon the Darkness was a huge project for Austin Swift
2019 brought Austin Swift's biggest acting opportunity yet with "We Summon the Darkness," a wild horror flick starring "The White Lotus" standout Alexandra Daddario and Johnny Knoxville. The slasher movie, which focuses on girls who work with a Satanic church to commit mass murders, features Swift as Ivan, an innocent guy who wanders into Alexis' (Daddario) clutches and is killed by her pretty early on in the story when he questions her deeply held religion.
Still, Swift was actually incredibly important to the overall success of "We Summon the Darkness," even though Ivan barely makes it through the movie ... because he also produced the film. Along with Daddario, Swift served as a co-producer on the movie, marking his first production credit. From there, though, he'd team up with his superstar sister to keep working as a producer on some of her biggest recent projects.
Austin Swift is also a producer — and he works with his famous sister
Unsurprisingly, as Taylor Swift's interests have trended towards cinema, her brother has collaborated with her (since there's not a single industry this woman doesn't apparently want to take by sheer force). Taylor Swift started directing her own music videos early in her career, but always with a collaborator; that changed in early 2020 with "The Man," a video for one of the lead singles featured on her seventh studio album "Lover." After that, Swift directed all of her own videos, including "cardigan" from "folklore," "willow" from "evermore," and eventually, "Anti-Hero," the hit single from her 2022 album "Midnights." (At the 2023 MTV Music Video Awards, Swift took home a whopping nine awards for the self-directed video.)
So where does Austin Swift come in? Well, he co-produced 2020's "Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions" — a documentary chronicling his sister's work on the Grammy-winning "folklore" with collaborators Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner — and also produced the music video for "I Bet You Think About Me" in 2021, which was directed by Taylor's close friend Blake Lively. Whether or not the brother-sister duo keep working together remains to be seen, but it's certainly not shocking that Austin and Taylor Swift keep finding clever ways to collaborate.