{"id":344399,"date":"2025-12-12T12:57:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/344399\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T12:57:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:57:07","slug":"taylor-swift-shares-anxieties-over-thwarted-attack-in-end-of-an-era-ep-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/344399\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Swift Shares Anxieties Over Thwarted Attack in ‘End of an Era’ Ep 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt doesn\u2019t take long for Taylor Swift<\/a>\u2019s Disney+<\/a> docuseries \u201cThe End of an Era<\/a>\u201d to get emotional. The first of the series\u2019 six episodes quickly opens a window on something that had stayed publicly unseen until now: just how the pop star reacted behind the scenes to the violence and threat of terrorism that cast a pall on the otherwise joyful experience of the European leg of her Eras Tour in 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe debut episode, which premiered at 3 a.m. ET\/midnght PT on Friday morning, gets off to a celebratory start. But it does not waste too much time in getting to a mid-episode segment that documents the tour\u2019s darkest hours. In footage shot at the time, Swift is seen shedding tears and sharing profound anxiety in the wake of two terrifying incidents \u2014 a thwarted terrorist plot around her Vienna concerts, and a deadly attack on children attending a dance class in Liverpool.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI thought that this would be a tour I was very proud of. But this is more than a tour,\u201d she says in Episode 1. \u201cIt\u2019s a force to be reckoned with in global culture. So never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe three Vienna concerts slated for August of last year were canceled after Austrian officials arrested two men who had plotted to attack Swift\u2019s fans. As her shows in London went on as scheduled after that, she approached the first of those concerts with far more fear and trepidation than she was about to let on, the episode shows.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBasically it\u2019s a weird feeling going into these last five shows in Europe because \u2026 we\u2019ve done 128 shows so far,\u201d she says in the 2024 footage, \u201cbut this is the first one where I feel like I\u2019m skating on thin ice or something. We just had this series of very violent, scary things happen to the tour. We dodged a massacre situation. There was this horrible attack in Liverpool at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. And it was little kids that, uh\u2026\u201d At this, she trails off, unable to complete the sentence and say that three children died after being assaulted by a knife-wielding attacker.<\/p>\n

\n\tA messae on screen says that Swift met with survivors of the Liverpool attack before each of the concerts in London. No footage of those meetings is included, but the cameras do catch Swift saying she will stop crying and become stoic in time to meet the families.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s gonna be fine, because when I meet them, I\u2019m not gonna do this. I swear to God, I\u2019m not gonna do this,\u201d she vows. \u201cI\u2019m gonna be smiling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich is an attitude she took into doing the concerts themselves. \u201cAny of this gets out of the way before you ever go upstage. You lock it off for three and a half hours. They don\u2019t have to worry about you. It\u2019s like you\u2019re a pilot flying the plane. And if you were like, \u2018Ooh, there\u2019s turbulence up ahead; I don\u2019t know if we\u2019re actually gonna land in Dallas; I\u2019m gonna try hard, but I don\u2019t know if I can actually figure out how to land through this turbulence,\u2019 everyone on the plane\u2019s gonna freak out.\u201d She knows how to navigate a crowd through the friendly skies. \u201cYou just have to have a calm, cool, collected tone of, \u2018We will be landing in in Dallas at 6:05 p.m. Got a little tubulence up ahead, but it\u2019s nothing we haven\u2019t seen before. Just keep your seat belts fastened and welcome to the Eras Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift is seen in the episode getting some help through the buddy system, as Ed Sheeran lifts her spirits and confidence when he arrives to practice a version of their duet \u201cEverything Has Changed,\u201d performed on the first night in London.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s very cool that he would come and do this,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause I think it\u2019s just gonna really delight people, in a moment when a lot of the fans need a pick-me-up, because I know I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift also gets a pep talk from her mother, Andrea Swift, after admitting that she is \u201ctwitchy and fidgety\u201d and her hands are shaky going into the first London gig. After getting through it, she is exultant and, as she puts it, ready to stay back on the horse.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the end of Episode 1, she is back to being focused on the \u201ceuphoria\u201d she sees in her crowds \u2014 and the intra-audience visual communication she witnesses from the stage. \u201cThere\u2019s so many hundreds of moments of individual eye contact throughout the course of the show. I see the mass quantities of joy that everyone\u2019s feeling. What\u2019s interesting is, there\u2019s some joy in the show, but there\u2019s a lot of emotions in this that aren\u2019t just like \u2018Put on your smiley face and come to the Eras Tour.\u2019 It is so much more. You look out in the crowd and these are millions of stories and all these counter-narratives, all colliding in one place where we feel safe to be demonstrative about a whole spectrum of emotion. That stuff is really powerful.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLife contains multitudes and we are kind of exploring all of the dramatic edges of those things\u201d in the concerts, she believes. \u201cThat\u2019s what might be unlocking feelings of joy\u2026 feelings of euphoria\u2026 and it still gets me. It does.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe second episode, which is also premiering Friday morning, focuses on more consistently upbeat subject matter, like the creation and execution of the tour\u2019s original choreography and especially a \u201cTortured Poets Department\u201d segment that was added after that surprise album came out in the spring of 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tEpisode 2 also spends much more time apart from Swift herself to meet with some of the celebrated members of her Eras Tour team, including choreographer Mandy Moore and fan-beloved dancer Kameron Saunders. (Look for Variety\u2019s coming review of the first two episodes.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSwift premiered these episodes at a morning screening in New York City Tuesday morning, attended by her family and dancers and a handful of members of the media.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was a year ago yesterday that we played the last show of the Eras Tour,\u201d Swift said in briefly introducing Tuesday\u2019s screening. \u201cIt feels insane. I know it does for me\u2026 It feels like the Eras Tour was a lifetime within my life, so it\u2019s so crazy to square it with it ending a year ago. And with that said, you know, I think since I started performing when I was 14 years old, I have been obsessed with the idea of trying to learn how to entertain people\u2026 All the lessons that I learned over 20-plus years are what it ended up being\u2026 And I know that\u2019s the case with not just me, but the dancers and the band and the backing vocalists and our lighting and technical departments and our choreography; everything that went into this was all the lessons we\u2019ve learned all of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe continued, \u201cAnd I think one thing that our amazing directors, Don Argott and Sheena Joyce, who are here did was that they told and expanded upon the stories of not just me, but everyone who was a part of this and their stories and what it took to get them to the place where they\u2019ve learned the lessons that it took to get them on that stage to execute this as well as they did.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBut there\u2019s a lot of magic and mystery and destiny and all that stuff,\u201d Swift added. \u201cWe can\u2019t explain what happens when something goes as well as this did, but anything that we can explain to you about how we did it, these amazing directors did that. And so I\u2019m so grateful that they put so much time and thought and care into this docuseries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Tuesday\u2019s screening of the two episodes concluded, Swift quickly stepped out in the screening room and began making some closing remarks, before being reminded that she was speaking off-mic and not audible to everyone scattered throughout the large screening room at Disney. \u201cI\u2019ve been off tour for a year and I forgot about what microphones do,\u201d she quipped.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe six episodes of \u201cThe End of an Era\u201d are being released two at a time in one-week intervals. Episodes 3 and 4, which have not screened, will come out on Disney+ Dec. 19, and the final two will debut Dec. 26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It doesn\u2019t take long for Taylor Swift\u2019s Disney+ docuseries \u201cThe End of an Era\u201d to get emotional. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[3716,88,4915,172351],"class_list":["post-344399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-disney","tag-entertainment","tag-taylor-swift","tag-the-end-of-an-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}