Taylor Swift hung up her sparkly party dresses to play a good girl gone bad in the video for “I Knew You Were Trouble.” In the clip, Swift’s pink-haired onscreen persona abandons all good reason to fall for a tatted-up bad boy.
The “Trouble” video has earned Swift two nominations at Sunday’s 2013 MTV Video Music Awards. The Anthony Mandler-directed clip is up for Video of the Year and Best Female Video. To get the inside scoop on the clip, MTV News sat down with her co-star, the video’s resident bad boy and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” actor Reeve Carney, to take the video frame by frame.
Swift and Carney shot the “Trouble” video last November in Los Angeles. The video follows the sometimes-troubled courtship of the onscreen lovers, right from first glance to last kiss. Carney recalled, “They did a lot of shooting, just kind of having us improvise, and Taylor was great at that. Not to be silly by using the name of one of her albums, but she is a very fearless person or at least she comes off to be that way.”
Carney got the chance to play Swift’s daring beau, who throws around his bad boy calling card quite frequently, including when he hangs out of a car while it’s in motion. “That car was really, really fun,” he said. “I loved the fact that they allowed me to that. That’s the good thing about not being the star. They would never have let Taylor stand up like that, even if she had begged to. And I think she would have liked to actually.”
Later on, his character also finds himself in fisticuffs, throwing punches against two guys. “Those guys were awesome. They were really scary, but they were so cool because after every take they would be like, ‘Are you OK, man? Are you alright?’ ” he recalled. “The switch between on-screen and off-screen with those guys were great. They’re really tough, but they are really kind as well, which I really appreciated. And I accidentally elbowed one of them in the face, and he was cool with it. He didn’t get mad at me ’cause I’m not really a stunt man. I’m just kind of improvising.”
At the height of their romance, Swift and Carney head to a rave, and it’s there that she gets a good idea of the kind of guy she’s dating. You see, he’s the kind of fella who goes to a massive party with her, makes out with other girls and then leaves her alone in the desert.
“I’m a pretty old-fashioned guy, I’d say,” Carney shared. “And so it was kind of strange for me to be kissing six girls in about the course of a minute. That was the thing that made me the most uncomfortable, honestly, in the whole video. I didn’t even get to know their names — that’s the sad part about it.”
Will Swift and her man take home a Moonman? Tune into the VMAs, live from Brooklyn on Sunday at 9 p.m., to find out! Swift is slated to make an appearance at the big show, which will include performances from Katy Perry, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Drake and more.
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