Taylor Swift's lookalike drag queen is 'on cloud nine' after appearing in 'You Need to Calm Down'
You need to calm down, but Jade Jolie doesn't. After all, she just had the break of a lifetime.
The Louisville drag queen has "literally been on cloud nine" since she had a key role alongside Taylor Swift in the pop superstar's latest music video.
"The last time I freaked out this much, it was the Spice Girls," Jolie said.
Jolie was a natural fit to be featured in Swift's video for her summer single "You Need to Calm Down." After all, she's been practicing her Taylor Swift drag performance for eight years, dressing up and performing as the Grammy-winning singer at Play and other venues.
Swift's latest video features, among other things (we won't go into too much detail but there's a lot going on), a group of drag queens dressed as celebrities on stage at a "pop queen pageant." At one point Jolie, dressed as Swift, stands in the middle of the group and lip syncs to a portion of the song, seen at the video's 2:15 mark.
More: Taylor Swift shouts out to LGBTQ fans, GLAAD on anti-hate anthem 'You Need To Calm Down'
It's a big moment for Jolie, who was featured years ago on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and has spent nearly a decade perfecting her Swift routine.
"This has just been so wonderful, the way that everyone’s kind of like had a chance to see how much I’ve grown since eight years ago," she said. "... It’s really awesome to see the blowup, from starting then and learning all the techniques I have to doing her now."
The whole thing came together pretty quickly. Jolie knew Todrick Hall, who knows Swift and co-produced the "You Need to Calm Down" video, and when they met up one night a year or so ago at local club Play Louisville while Jolie was doing her Swift act, Hall sent a photo of the two of them to the real Swift. Swift reached back out and said she liked what she saw.
Then, around a month ago, Hall reached back out to Jolie with an idea. Swift needed a look-alike for her upcoming music video, Jolie said, and "he couldn’t imagine anyone else that does Taylor."
Before she knew it, Jolie was on a set in Santa Clarita, California (just north of Los Angeles, about a half-hour drive from Hollywood), for a one-day shoot for Swift's upcoming video.
More: Taylor Swift makes peace with Katy Perry in 'You Need to Calm Down' music video
They say you never want to meet your heroes, Jolie said, because you never know how it's going to turn out. But this was different — Swift even broke out the Champagne at one point for a toast to the performers.
"It was even better than I imagined," Jolie said. "She came in our dressing room while we weren’t scheduled to do anything, she just like came in and hung out with us. She made sure she came over and talked to each one of us individually. It was so awesome."
The video is a smash hit. It had been viewed nearly 40 million times Thursday morning, just three days after its debut.
The clips might look bright and sunny, but don't be fooled — it was cloudy and windy that day on the West Coast, Jolie said.
"We were all kind of freezing up there, but it’s just so cool how everything looks so toasty, it’s funny," she said.
It would have taken a little more than some cool weather to break up the good time, though.
"She took great care of us — everything, the whole time," Jolie said. "She put us in a beautiful place, everything was taken care of. She treated us all like queens."