In one scene of the new six-part Taylor Swift Eras Tour docuseries, The End of an Era, two fans profess how excited they are to see her perform at London’s Wembley Stadium that night. “Just seeing her face, like, it’s like she’s not a real person [until I see her live],” one giddily exclaims in a perfect encapsulation of how our biggest pop stars seem to us.
It is immediately juxtaposed with Swift in a backstage area, guitar on her lap, fiddling on her phone, listening to an audiobook. She’s restless, clenching and unclenching her shaking fists. Her mom comes in, and Swift tells her she’s having a “physical reaction” to anxiety about performing on stage after the cancellation of her August 2024 Vienna shows due to a terrorist threat, and the late July Southport attack at a Swift-themed dance and yoga event where three children were killed.
“I’ve been performing for 20 years. From a mental standpoint, being afraid that something’s gonna happen to your fans at any moment, this is a new challenge,” Swift admits. “I want to keep all of the nerves I have away from the crowd because when you’re sort of the ringleader of this show, they can sense any kind of shift, energetically, from you and you have to really focus on that and factor that in that you’re at the Eras Tour! Nothing’s wrong.”
Almost all music documentaries (especially ones where the artist helped create it) rest on the premise of uncovering who a performer is when they are not performing — the disparity between who someone actually is and who they present themselves to be. Swift’s last documentary effort, 2019’s Miss Americana, pulled off the bit almost too well. (Her political comments in that film are often circulated to call attention to her perceived lack of political engagement in the present.) The End of an Era, directed by Don Argott and Sheena Joyce (who both worked on 2023's Kelce), continues this tradition at a well-chosen time for an artist whose business enterprise has far surpassed her art in the public discourse. The first episode’s main argument is this: there is a human underneath all of the glitter.
Ed Sheeran, Swift’s longtime friend and collaborator, says this directly. His arrival at Wembley interrupts Swift’s spiral — her mom says it’s “just what the doctor ordered” — and the pair sit down to rehearse that night’s surprise song mashup.
“I just need to do this show,” Swift says to both Sheeran and herself, “[to] remember the joy of it, because I’m a little bit … I get two months off after this, which I need now more than ever … I’m just gonna go somewhere no one can find me. I don’t wanna be tracked like an animal. I’ve felt very hunted lately.”
Sheeran affirms this: “People have forgotten you’re a human being amongst all this as well.” Swift nods, “100 percent.”
Swift has sung about feeling hunted in the past, though it was in reference to paparazzi shots and scrutiny of her romantic life. The circumstances here have escalated; it’s an entirely different thing to experience a reality where your fame could be used against your fans by terrorists, where any wrong move could potentially put the people who love you in actual mortal danger. The episode shows some of how destabilizing that is, though you can also see Swift warring with herself on how much emotion she feels entitled to show amid other people’s grief.
In 2018, Ariana Grande told British Vogue about the PTSD she experienced after the Manchester bombing killed 22 people and injured over a thousand after her show in 2017. “It's hard to talk about because so many people have suffered such severe, tremendous loss,” Grande said. “I feel like I shouldn't even be talking about my own experience – like I shouldn't even say anything. I don't think I'll ever know how to talk about it and not cry.”
Swift’s interviews in the docuseries express a similar sentiment. She can’t explain what happened in Southport without breaking down. When she prepares to meet survivors and the families of the victims before her London shows, she’s fully aware of how she must manage her own emotions — and how weird it is to think about putting on a pop concert afterward.
“I’m gonna be fine, because when I meet them I’m not gonna do this, I swear to God,” she says, referencing her tears. “I’m not gonna do this. I’m gonna be smiling. So any of this gets out of the way before you ever go on stage. You lock it off [for] three and a half hours, [and] they don’t have to worry about you.” She compares it to flying a plane. A pilot doesn’t cry or panic about turbulence; they land the plane safely.
“It’s my job to be able to handle all these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform,” she says. “That’s just the way it’s got to be.”
But there's an inherent paradox to all of this: she doesn't want fans to see the cracks on stage, but she does want them to see her emotions in an artist documentary where she has more narrative oversight.
It is interesting to see in real time the way she shuts it all off. She emerges from meeting the families in her sparkling orange blazer and wipes away her tears in private, takes shuddering breaths. The blazer comes off, and she climbs into her cleaning cart box to be wheeled to the stage. The camera is inside the box; we’re invited to watch her as she composes herself to the very last second. Then: the opening notes, the rising platform, and Taylor Swift™ snaps into position. Shiny and perfect, pop music in human form, ready to immerse you in a temporary world where nothing bad will ever happen to you. Rarely does she break down on stage. The most you’ll get is a teary eye, or a slight catch in her voice.
But in presenting this perfection to us on stage — and bringing out imperfection mainly in a medium she can fully control, and understandably so — she locks herself into it. The cycle continues: people forget she’s human because she does not show them that she is very often, but also, should we have to be reminded? What are we owed from our pop stars in terms of public vulnerability, and what to make of it when it comes in the perfectly-packaged music documentary format? Can calculated honesty, real emotions taped for product promotion, still be honest? That question might follow her forever, and it's compelling that we'll never nail down the answer.
This is the way she thinks she has to be to survive. Maybe she does — this is a person who takes her work and art very seriously. Maybe there’s no perfect way to be a celebrity at this level, with the immense amount of pressure, the weight of economies on your shoulders, and feeling and actually being responsible for the life of everyone you work with and everyone watching you perform. Crumble under the weight or present the sustainably profitable version so you can keep doing what you love. This is the way she has chosen.
