Ranking Every Taylor Swift Acting Performance

In "exile," the second single from her Grammy-winning album "folklore," Taylor Swift muses that she thinks she's "seen this film before, and I didn't like the ending." This obtuse, imaginative line far surpasses any of her cinematic achievements to date.

Allow me to be clear: in my humble estimation, Taylor Swift is one of the best artists working today, if not the best. I've spent entirely too much money in her merch store, I saw the Eras Tour stop in Philadelphia and cried through a lot of it, and whether or not I have a Swift-inspired tattoo is neither here nor there. Throughout 2023, she dominated headlines with her record-smashing Eras Tour and was named the person of said year by Time Magazine. She often breaks her own records for album and tour sales by just topping her own achievements. On February 4, 2024, she became the only performer to ever win album of the year four times at the Grammys, breaking the record held by Paul Simon, Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and ... herself. She has also appeared in a handful of projects as an actor, and a lot of them are mediocre at best.

Putting aside her performances in music videos (many of which she directed herself, like 2022's acclaimed video for "Anti-Hero") as well as her "lead" performance in "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour," Swifties are pretty much in agreement that the singer-songwriter makes some strange choices when it comes to acting. So, how do her performances hold up? Which is the worst, which is the best, and which one spawned a banger of a breakup track? I'm here to tell you.

Taylor Swift is barely in "The Giver," and that's for the best. After the success of the "Hunger Games" franchise, Hollywood tried — several times — to recapture that particular lightning in a bottle and adapt other teen dystopian films, including Lois Lowry's "The Giver." To say the returns were diminishing is an understatement.

Luckily for Swift, she only appears in "The Giver" for about three minutes, and she's a hologram. In a scene with the titular Giver (Jeff Bridges), who needs to pass the job of Receiver of Memory on to Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), the Giver tells Jonas that Swift's Rosemary was the previous Giver-in-training. As they watch a memory of her playing the piano, the Giver proceeds to tell Jonas that Rosemary was driven mad by the influx of memories she received and asked that she be "released" (which, in-universe, means she was euthanized). I don't think I'm alone when I say that the idea of Taylor Alison Swift being put down is pretty upsetting, so between that and the sheer brevity of this performance, Rosemary in "The Giver" ranks dead last. Also, Scooter Braun was an executive producer on this film — enough said.

Taylor Swift's voice performance in "The Lorax" isn't necessarily bad — it's just unremarkable. I nearly forgot about "The Lorax" while I was trying to accurately rank Swift's acting performances, to be totally frank. She's in this Dr. Seuss adaptation, though! Swift plays Audrey, a character who's named after Theodore Geisel's beloved wife and who's not found in the original book, and she's the love interest to Zac Efron's protagonist Ted Wiggins. Audrey loves trees and magic and she has big dreams and imagines stuff. That's pretty much her whole deal.

I don't really know what to tell you here. Swift is, if nothing else, good at standing in a recording studio and saying things into a microphone, so nothing is wrong with her performance, per se. This is just a largely forgotten kid's movie that happens to have Swift in it. Also, this is probably the only time in history Taylor Swift will ever star in anything alongside Danny DeVito unless she decides to appear on any episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," a prospect I just came up with and think should happen. 

Taylor Swift's greatest talent — which is saying something — is that she can change genres at the drop of a hat. She started as a country singer with her self-titled debut, moved seamlessly into full-on pop music with 2014's "1989," and went all-in on folk rock for "folklore" and "evermore" in 2021. We should have all figured that out when she played one girl displaying three distinct personalities on the "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" episode "Turn, Turn, Turn" in 2009.

Long story short, Swift's Haley is the adopted child of motel owners who happen to hate her and the biological daughter of a relatively unstable single mother. Throughout the episode, she sports her natural blonde hair, an auburn wig (a potential harbinger for her "All Too Well: The Short Film" hair?), and an emo-punk black wig with too much eye makeup. The last look is what she's sporting when she's killed in a parking lot (by, spoiler alert, said biological mother). This performance is, utlimately, sort of a typical "CSI" gimmick, but Swift does a decent job with what she's given.

"Amsterdam" is a puzzling movie on multiple levels, and it's a net positive that Taylor Swift's character, Elizabeth Meekins, dies almost immediately after she's introduced. (Spoiler alert, I guess, for a movie that's several years old and that nobody liked very much.) Director David O. Russell was really trying for Oscar glory again with this dud, a layered mystery focused on the murder of some guy Swift's character is related to and also a real thing from the 1930s called the Business Plot. That stuff doesn't really matter; what does matter is that when Elizabeth Meekins is approached by Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), a hitman played by Tom Hardy immediately tackles her and shoves her into traffic.

I've written about Swift's performance in "Amsterdam" before and there's not that much more to say, except that "Amsterdam" is a middling-to-bad movie directed by Russell, who has been accused multiple times of abusing cast members on set. Unfortunately for performers like Margot Robbie, they had to be in more than a few moments of this stinker. Swift, at the very least, got to die quickly, expediently, and in a relatively silly way (although the stunt work is solid, at least).

I've also previously discussed the fact that Taylor Swift appearing on "New Girl" as some lady named Elaine creates a vast, sucking plot chasm within the show's universe because of how often the characters mention Swift. (My favorite name-drop is when Zooey Deschanel's Jessica Day says "I just wanted to listen to Taylor Swift alone" while crying into a glass of rosé. Girl, I get it.) In any case, Swift is funny in her cameo on the show's Season 2 finale, "Elaine's Big Day," where she runs away with groom-to-be Shivrang (Satya Bhabha) and leaves would-be bride Cece Parikh (Hannah Simone) free to pursue her real love, Schmidt (real-life Swiftie Max Greenfield).

"New Girl" is really, really good at funny specifics, and Elaine's line about painting pictures of Shivrang "on her easel" is a great example. Yes, it's fully ridiculous for Swift to appear on a show that name-checks her as regularly as it does, but I don't care. Time is a flat circle, reality is an illusion, and Swift's Elaine being two full heads taller than Bhabha's Shivrang also makes for an excellent visual. If you, like me, are a fan of both Swift and "New Girl," putting this as her fifth-best performance is a no-brainer.

"Cats" is a bizarre, upsetting fever dream of a movie that should never have been attempted in the first place. Released at the end of 2019 and helmed by director Tom Hooper, the adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's billion-dollar Broadway musical is an unmitigated disaster. Taylor Swift is in it, and she's ... fine.

It feels unsurprising, on some level, that Swift is in the definitive "Cats" adaptation. She's a self-described cat lady who has three — Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson, and Benjamin Button — and the project is, after all, a musical. Swift shows up about midway through this catastrophe of a movie as Bombalurina, a feline femme fatale who gets everyone wasted on catnip and (literally) sings the praises of bad kitty Macavity (a truly disturbing Idris Elba). 

Bombalurina is not Swift's worst role, and it's certainly not her best. She's just kind of there, and she does what she does best: sings and dances. After that, she never appears again in the film which she later characterized as a "weird-ass-movie" while speaking with Variety. (She also told Variety she had a "great time" working on "Cats," but the title track on her 2021 quarantine album "evermore" says that "motion capture put [her] in a bad light," so TBD where she stands there.)

In the end, "Cats" didn't really stick to Swift's overall career, which is a relief for her and her fans alike ... and the song she and Webber co-wrote for the film, "Beautiful Ghosts," isn't completely terrible, if that helps.

I know what you're thinking: "Valentine's Day" is way too high on this list. Two counter-arguments: this is my list, and "Valentine's Day" is a fluffy, silly performance that ended up generating way better future content as it pertains to Taylor Swift. Hear me out.

After movies like "Love Actually" and "He's Just Not That Into You" wove together a whole bunch of love stories connected by tenuous threads, Hollywood decided to go back to that well again and again. So, unsurprisingly, one of those giant ensemble movies ended up being set on Valentine's Day. Swift plays high-schooler Felicia who's obsessed with her boyfriend Willy (Taylor Lautner), and the scene everyone remembers is the one where Felicia is being interviewed by a local news organization about "young love." She immediately says she's "not the cheerleader" to Willy's track star — quite obviously referencing the "cheer captain" from her hit "You Belong With Me" — and then shows off the moves she learned on the dance team. Honestly, she's funny. She takes her terrible dance routine deadly seriously! It's a good bit!

Here's what's important, though: without her performance in "Valentine's Day," Swift and Lautner never would have dated. Without their brief relationship, Swift never would have written perhaps the only song where she apologizes to a boy — the pained, exquisite "Back to December" from "Speak Now." The two never would have rekindled their friendship and Lautner never would have filmed the music video for the "Speak Now" vault track "I Can See You" in 2023. Consequently, Lautner never would have backflipped down the Eras Tour stage that year. See? I told you. "Valentine's Day" deserves this spot.

At this point, I'm starting to worry that Taylor Swift simply won't find the time to make good on her deal to write and direct a film for Searchlight Pictures — but if she does get behind the camera, she'll hopefully replicate the success of 2021's "All Too Well: The Short Film." The lore here is both straightforward and complex. "All Too Well," the vulnerable, emotional fifth track from Swift's album "Red," got a major extension when she re-recorded said album in 2021. "All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor's Version) (From the Vault)" broke everyone's brains when it was finally released, and Swift's original take on this incriminating, devastating breakup song was immediately hailed as her masterpiece. 

A short film followed, written and directed by Swift and starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien as the doomed couple at the center of the song's story. Swift is in it too, though, and as the director, she masterfully deploys ... herself. After watching Sink and O'Brien's relationship completely fall apart, Sink spends months grieving before sitting down at a typewriter, at which point she becomes Swift as the artist reads aloud from her novel, titled "All Too Well." It's a slick move, and once you get over her violently red hair, you realize it makes sense to have Sink's character become the true writer of her own story. Could Sink have just ... played that character? Probably. Swift is good in the brief appearance, though, and her careful direction of the entire endeavor bumps this entry up to second place.

Taylor Swift's best performances are on-stage, and that includes the stage at Studio 8H in Manhattan. Swift made her true debut on "Saturday Night Live" in 2009 as host and musical guest — and as veteran writer-performer Seth Meyers told Howard Stern years later, she waltzed into head honcho Lorne Michaels' office alongside Meyers and presented a fully-formed musical monologue. She ended up performing it on the show, cracking jokes about her torrid romantic past and various scandals, noting that there was security flanking the stage in case of any Kanye West-style interruptions. Ultimately, this moment cemented Swift as a talent who was more than capable of commanding an audience at an institution like "SNL." 

I can't talk about Swift on "SNL," though, without mentioning her appearance in a pre-taped segment made by digital short-makers Please Don't Destroy. During a November 2021 episode in which she was also the musical guest, Swift showed up alongside Pete Davidson and PDD players Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall in "Three Sad Virgins." The digital short sees Davidson escalating a deranged diss track about Herlihy, Higgins, and Marshall, which eventually culminates with Swift stepping in to "write" the bridge (Swift's known for her bridges, in case you missed it). I never knew I wanted to watch Taylor Swift croon that Herlihy has the "charm and sex appeal of a scarecrow" or notice Higgins' "big-ass bowling ball head," but my life has never been the same. Throw in the fact that Swift came up with a bunch of burns for the trio on her own, and you've got her greatest on-screen performance beyond her concert films.