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Taylor Swift‘s new docuseries got off to an emotional start.
The first episode of The End of an Era, which began streaming Friday, December 12, on Disney+, opened with Swift, 35, getting choked up backstage in a huddle with her backup dancers during the final show of her blockbuster Eras Tour in December 2024.
Swift reminded her crew that they “performed for over 10 million people in person” throughout the 149-date tour, calling it “the biggest challenge” any of them had “ever” undertaken.
The episode also documented the aftermath of two harrowing incidents that occurred during The Eras Tour‘s nearly two-year run: a fatal knife attack on a Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, in July 2024 and a thwarted terrorist attack at the pop star’s Vienna concerts, which she ultimately canceled, less than two weeks later.
Cameras captured Swift breaking down in tears over the violence and vulnerably expressing her fears to get back on stage for her subsequent shows in London. At one point, she compared herself to a pilot who has to remain “cool, calm, collected” despite “turbulence” ahead.
The second episode of the docuseries is much lighter, primarily chronicling Swift’s rehearsals for the revamped version of The Eras Tour, which she debuted in Paris in May 2024 following the release of her album The Tortured Poets Department.
“It was such an exciting challenge to try to improve upon a show I already loved,” she previously wrote in her official Eras Tour Book.
Taylor Swift Disney+
In addition to The End of an Era, Swift dropped a three-plus-hour concert movie titled The Eras Tour: The Final Show on Friday, which she filmed in Vancouver, Canada, as she wrapped up the record-breaking trek.
Taylor Swift started writing songs about love and breakups in the early 2000s, but her talent was soon recognized by music executives who knew she was the real deal. From releasing her first record in 2006 to gracing stages all over the world this star has earned her place in the Hollywood A-list music scene. […]
Scroll down to read the biggest revelations from the first two episodes of The End of an Era, which are now streaming on Disney+. Two more installments will debut on December 19 followed by the two-part finale on December 26.
Her Inspiring Speeches
Fans get a rare glimpse of Swift speaking to her dancers and band backstage at the beginning of the docuseries.
“I think about every single one of you as little kids,” she told the group. “I think about the moment that you decided that dancing was your calling and the moment that you first saw a band and thought, ‘Man, I want to save up for an instrument.’ Every single one of us has picked professions that categorically people, for the majority of the time, they tell you you shouldn’t do it. … You have to love the thing so much that you override 85 to 95 percent of the advice you are given along the way by oftentimes people that you respect, people you trust, people in the field. Everyone in dance, everyone in music will tell everyone younger, ‘If there’s anything else you can do, do that!’”
Swift teared up as she went on to say that she also envisions her crew growing old and fondly looking back on their memories from The Eras Tour.
“I’ll think about what you’re gonna tell your family or the people that you mentor because every single person in here has the spirit to mentor others and to tell them, ‘Yes, do it. Try it. Go for it,’” she said. “Everyone likes to talk about phenomenons like The Eras Tour almost as if it was pieces falling into place in some sort of accidental confluence of events that just happened, right? … It is our job to make this look accidental, and it is our job to make this look effortless, but I just want every single one of you to know that I in no way, shape or form look at this as the pieces just falling into place. You put the pieces where they are.”
Where It All Started
Swift shared that she “came up with the idea for The Eras Tour about two years” before it launched in March 2023 thanks in large part to two “unpleasant” moments: the sale of her masters and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I just thought to myself, ‘What if I did a tour that celebrated all of these different moments in my life and career where you have chapters divided up by albums and everything changes when the chapter changes?’” she recalled, later explaining, “I wanted to overserve the fans. That was my main goal. I wanted to overserve them in terms of the amount of songs they were going to hear, the length of the show, what kinds of production they were going to see, different styles of dance, different worlds of dance, wardrobe, how far I was going to push myself.”
Taylor Swift clapped back at critics who think she should “go away” while stopping by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to promote her upcoming Eras Tour docuseries, The End of an Era. The pop superstar, 35, appeared on the Wednesday, December 10, episode of Stephen Colbert‘s CBS late night show, stepping on stage in a […]
Her Support System
The first episode showed Swift on the phone with her now-fiancé, Travis Kelce, ahead of her London shows in August 2024, taking viewers behind the scenes of the couple’s high-profile relationship.
After Kelce, 36, asked Swift how she and her special guest that evening, Ed Sheeran, were “so good” at their jobs, she replied, “I love you. I don’t know, how do you remember 36,000 plays that are all tactical missions and then just go do it? It’s the same. It’s basically the same job! I got songs to remember, you got plays to remember.”
The Kansas City Chiefs tight end then noted, “You got teammates, I got teammates,” to which Swift agreed, “You’ve got Coach [Andy] Reid, I’ve got my mom.” (Indeed, Swift’s mother, Andrea, makes frequent appearances in the doc, from on-camera interviews to joining her superstar daughter at tour rehearsals.)
Later in their conversation, Kelce sweetly told Swift, “Thanks for making my life better.”
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift Patrick Smith/Getty Images
How She Found Out About Terror Plot
Swift told Sheeran backstage at Wembley Stadium in London that she was “on the plane” to Vienna when she was informed that officials had prevented a “massacre” from happening during her concert.
Later, after meeting families affected by the Southport stabbings, a visibly anxious Swift is shown bursting into tears just moments before her return to the stage.
“It’s my job to kind of be able to handle all of these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform,” she told the cameras. “That’s just the way it’s got to be.”
Swift compared herself to a pilot elsewhere in the doc, explaining, “If you were like, ‘Oh, there’s turbulence up ahead. I don’t know if we’re actually gonna land in Dallas. I’m gonna try hard, but I don’t know if I can actually figure out how to land through this turbulence.’ Everyone on the plane is going to freak out. You just have to have a calm, cool, collected tone of like, ‘We will be landing in Dallas at 6:05 p.m. Got a little turbulence up ahead, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Just keep your seatbelts fastened, and welcome to The Eras Tour!’”
Her Routine After Shows
Following her London concert, filmmakers followed Swift back to her hotel room, where she immediately greeted her cat and began drawing a bath while removing her makeup.
“I’m not gonna be able to get to sleep ’cause I can’t, like, come down,” she said at the end of episode 1. “This is why people need drugs, but I don’t do drugs, so I just, like, let it ride. I just am like, ‘Oh, I’ll go to sleep when I’m tired.’ And when I’m tired, it’s like 4 in the morning. So I watch tons of TV, I eat room service in bed, I sign a box of 2,000 CDs and then I’m tired. And then we do the whole thing again.”
Adding Tortured Poets to Her Setlist
Swift introduced the Tortured Poets portion of her set during her Paris shows, less than one month after the album dropped. In order to prepare the new section, Swift and her team secretly rehearsed behind the scenes — without playing the music out loud, so as to prevent leaks.
“When we had done the first half of the tour, what the fans didn’t know at the time was that I was writing a brand-new album, The Tortured Poets Department, and in the middle of me releasing the album, we had to be all hands on deck, creating a brand new era to put into the show to represent that album,” Swift said in the second episode of the docuseries. “Doing all of this completely secretly, all in, like, a tiny little break that we had between Asia and Europe. We built this top-secret rehearsal facility for us to lock in the setlist.”
Swift went on to explain that she had to do “surgical tweaking” to the songs so she could fit as many as she wanted to in the show, which famously was more than three and half hours long.
“And then we put together all new choreography. Learning choreography, all just hearing it in our heads, because they can’t play the music on speakers because it’s not out yet,” she added. “There’s an entirely new order of the chapters, so I’m relearning the entire show essentially.”
Backstage, Swift told some of her crew that she was excited about the challenge, saying, “I think I’d rather feel this way, where I’m a little bit confused, a little bit like, ‘ … What?’ than being, like, on autopilot. Because the show we were doing in Asia, I could do in my sleep.”
In a confessional, Swift admitted that the addition was a “risk” — and she would have been upset if her fans had not enjoyed the new set.
“I swear to God, if I heard people online being like, ‘I miss the old show,’ I was gonna be like, ‘Oh, my God, you have no idea how hard this was to do,’” she told the camera.
How Emma Stone Influenced The Eras Tour
In the second episode, Swift revealed Emma Stone is the reason she hired choreographer Mandy Moore to work on The Eras Tour.
“With choreography, I asked one of my friends, Emma Stone, who’s done a lot of work in dance in her films, ‘Who have you worked with that you would recommend for this?’ And she’s like, ‘There’s only one person that needs to be on your list, and it’s Mandy Moore,’” Swift recalled.
In her own interview, Moore said she was surprised to be asked to join the project but thrilled to take it on.
“I never would have thought that I would be in the same sentence as Taylor Swift ever in my life,” she explained. “You know, I’ve always been a big fan, but funny enough, I come from really more film and television; I don’t really do artists’ performance. Now I understand why I was brought in. She really wanted to do something different, and she likes the storytelling. I mean, her songs are mini movies, so when I listen to them, it’s just lyrics and melody swirling with ideas in my head, and then you just start making something. And then all of a sudden it comes out.”
Taylor Swift Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Choosing Her Dancers
The End of an Era includes interviews with several of Swift’s dancers, including Kam Saunders and Amanda Balen, the latter of whom acted as a stand-in for Swift during rehearsals before joining her on stage. In a confessional interview, Swift explained that she intentionally chose dancers who came from different backgrounds and did not all have the same body type.
“People can get very opinionated about things looking very uniform. That’s not what I wanted to do with The Eras Tour,” she explained. “I feel like when you look up on stage as a fan, if you see people that represent you, your friends, the people you see in the world, that’s, I think, much more emotional and more connective and powerful. I really wanted everyone to look up on that stage and think, ‘I see myself in that person.’”
She added, “I don’t want dancers that blend in. I don’t care about them pulling focus. I want them to pull focus. I want you to feel like you saw an entire crew of individual stars on the stage.”
Handing Out Bonuses
The second episode shows Swift handing out her now-famous bonuses, which came in envelopes she individually hand-sealed with wax. Each one also contained a poem, which Saunders read aloud as Swift presented the gifts to her dancers (with the dollar amount of the bonuses censored).
“Bonus day is so important, because setting a precedent with The Eras Tour is really important to me, because people who work on the road, if the tour grosses more … they get more of a bonus, and these people just work so hard, and they are the best at what they do,” Swift said in a confessional. “So, every single person on the crew, I’ve handwritten them a note. It took me a couple weeks, but it’s fun to write the notes. It’s fun to think about everybody’s lives that they’re gonna go back to and the time off they’re gonna have and the kids they haven’t seen because they’ve been away for months, and just making that worthwhile for them is really — it feels like Christmas morning when you finally get to say thank you.”
How She Learns Choreography
In one scene from episode 2, Swift admitted that she has not always had an easy time with dancing in her shows.
“Everybody’s got their things they’re good at. It’s taken me a really long time to be even fine at choreography,” she said. “Mandy knows how to approach teaching me choreography from a lyrical perspective. I don’t do eight counts. I learn based on what syllable of the lyric I’m attaching a movement to. And I can’t really learn any other way. I’ve tried.”
Swift went on to note that working with world-class talents like Moore makes her want to succeed.
“It also is interesting to be in a position where, like, this is a team of experts,” she explained. “And there’s something about that that keeps me on my game and focused and locked in. It’s one of the elements where that kind of pressure is a privilege, because they’re not messing up, so it better not be me!”
Her Pride in The Eras Tour
Swift revealed in the second episode that she used to wonder after concerts whether her fans had the experience they wanted, but she did not feel that way after coming off stage following each night of Eras.
“I used to kind of be leaving the shows and seeing people walk home and think, ‘I really hope they got what they’ve been waiting for. I hope they got what they’ve been saving up their money for,’” she recalled. “There’s a feeling I have of such pride and satisfaction, because when I leave The Eras Tour, I never wonder that. There’s just, like, this magic in the air. All these particles of shimmer and glitter and confetti and girlhood and friendship bracelet beads.”
