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Taylor Swift has just released the accompanying 14-minute short film to her new 10-minute version of her 2012 track “All Too Well”, a song which allegedly chronicled the short but formative relationship the singer had with actor Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010.
While it’s been 11 years since Gyllenhaal ended the three-month love affair, the short film which stars Sadie Sink, 19, and Dylan O’Brien, 30, is the visual accompaniment to a narrative we have longed to know more about. Through Swift’s lens, we get an insight into the pair’s time together, how they “became lost in translation”, and how deeply the relationship’s rocky aftermath affected the singer.
“Are you for real?” Sink’s character says to O’Brien’s character, during a morning snuggle.
“What do you mean?” O’Brien’s character replies.
“I just feel like maybe I made you up,” Sink says.
There’s lots of kissing by lakes and by fireplaces, and there is also insight into some pretty big arguments. Watch it now.
The extended track, released yesterday, spills more tea than the 2012 original and talks about how Swift was “weeping in a party bathroom” after “someone” didn’t turn up to her 21st birthday. “You, who charmed my dad with self-effacing jokes” Swift says in one line. “Sipping coffee like you’re on a late-night show / But then he watched me watch the front door all night, willing you to come / And he said, “It’s supposed to be fun turning twenty-one.”
The clincher came later: “And I was never good at telling jokes but the punch line goes / I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age,” she says in another.
“You said if we had been closer in age maybe it would be fine / And that made me want to die.”
RELATED: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Instagram Page Is Littered With Scarves
RELATED: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Instagram Page Is Littered With Scarves
Sparking rumours of a romance at a taping of Saturday Night Live in October of 2010, the pair cemented their relationship status when they famously went for a stroll through New York City before visiting Gyllenhaal’s sister, Maggie, for Thanksgiving. Swift was 21 at the time, Gyllenhaal was 30.
Gyllenhaal reportedly called it quits with the singer in January 2011. “Jake just told her it wasn’t working out. Taylor is really upset and hurt. She feels really burned by him,” a source told US Weekly at the time. Broken and bruised, Swift channelled her pain into her music, writing the song “All Too Well”, her fractured heart bleeding into its thinly-veiled, lovelorn lyrics about scarves left at “someone’s” sister’s place in upstate New York.
RELATED: JAKE GYLLENHAAL DOES NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT TAYLOR SWIFT
Then there was this very captivating Grammy’s performance in 2012, Swift visibly upset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB7noMnaGO8
“The way that this song was written was, I was going through a bit of a sad time,” Swift explained to Jimmy Fallon overnight of her experience writing the song post breakup. “I was in band rehearsals for a tour that I was about to go out on called the Speak Now Tour and I showed up for rehearsals, and I just was really upset and sad and everybody could tell. It was really not fun to be around me that day.”
“It’s really nice to be able to put this album out and not be sad. Not be, like, taking breaks in between interviews to cry,” she told Seth Meyers in an interview yesterday. “I’m telling you, it’s much better this way.”
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While commenters are looking to Gyllenhaal for a response, I can’t help but wonder how Swift’s current boyfriend Joe Alwyn is feeling. Some relationships – no matter their duration – are deep and defining. But how will a current partner feel about their significant other fleshing out a past relationship eleven years on?
Questions for today: Do we need to rehash how Taylor and Jake used to dance around the refrigerator light? And can someone please check on Joe?
