NEWS: Taylor Swift is NOT Eponine!

Taylor Swift Is Out Of The Picture! (pun intended) This is a pleasing development.

I haven’t been all that impressed with the casting choices for this important movie; they seemed random, big-name-oriented, and, above all, disjointed. This casting (re-casting?) is a direct shift in that wind. SAMANTHA BARKS is making her film debut as Eponine, a role that marked her West End debut last year & that she revived in the Les Miserables 25th Anniversary Concert at The O2. Before playing Eponine, she finished in the Top Three in “I’d Do Anything” (the BBC search for the new ‘Nancy’ in Cameron Mackintosh’s Oliver!), workshopped Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies, played Sally Bowles in the national tour of Cabaret, and played the title role in Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Windsor. I’m so glad they decided to go with a true-blue musical theatre girl, especially considering the stiff competition of runners-up like Lea Michele, Scarlett Johansson & Evan Rachel Wood.

I love that Samantha Barks has a fresh face. She’s an underdog of sorts, being relatively unknown except to the musical theatre community. For the iPhone generation that will be experiencing The Great Les Miserables for the first time, it would be difficult to dissociate the familiar face of TAYLOR SWIFT with the independent & isolated character that is Eponine. Had Swift actually been cast in this role, I am completely confident that ‘On My Own’ would have ended up as a strange, re-mixed, country/radio version of a most beloved classic musical theatre ballad. Thankfully/hopefully, it will be more along the lines of this:

My favorite element of this casting development was

the musical-theatre fairy-tale manner in which it was delivered. 

Barks is currently playing Nancy in the West End’s Oliver! (after coming in 3rd place 4 years ago in “I’d Do Anything”).

 During curtain calls on January 31, Cameron Mackintosh announced that Barks had won the race for the role.

“I can’t believe I’m going to play Eponine, a role so close to my heart, a role I played in the West End. It’s the happiest moment of my life. The moment I found out I started to shake and then I started crying. I’m still shaking now."

~Samantha Barks