What we’ve learned from Taylor Swift ‘The End of an Era’ documentary

Travis Kelce appeared on stage at one of Taylor Swift's London shows. (Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Every night Taylor Swift stepped out to perform on the Eras Tour, she became a symbol as much as a person – the biggest pop star of her generation who had created a billion-dollar phenomenon.

Despite this success, Swift manages to retain some of the “girl next door” aura, which creates a strong parasocial connection for her fans. And that is on full display in the first two episodes of the new Disney+ documentary “The End of an Era” which details the behind-the-scenes of Swift’s record-breaking tour.

“It’s our job to make this look accidental, it’s our job to make this look effortless,” Swift tells her dancers before the tour’s final show in December 2024 – the documentary’s opening scene.

“This was the biggest challenge any of us had ever done.”

In making the distinction between Swift the person, and Swift the performer, the documentary reveals several new things about her – namely how she reacted to the death of three young girls who were stabbed during a Swift-themed dance class in northwest England and the foiled terrorist attack on one of her concerts in Vienna. It also details how she conceived of the Eras Tour and her relationship with Travis Kelce.

How Swift conceived of the Eras Tour

Before Swift embarked on the Eras Tour, she hadn’t toured for almost five years. And during that time she pinpoints two enormous events in her life which helped to shape the tour – the sale of her music catalog to a company owned by music manager Scooter Braun and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As Swift re-recorded her old albums in an attempt to regain control over her catalog, she found herself revisiting her old music and her old self.

“I feel like I’m rereading my old diaries, thinking about all the different girls I was until I was this one,” Swift says. “So that planted a little seed … the idea of celebrating your past.”

It still took a huge amount of time to realize that idea – she says she started physically training six months before rehearsals.

Swift met with Southport families

Although the Eras Tour represented a joyful experience for her fans, in the summer of 2024 “we had this series of very violent, scary things happen,” Swift recalls in the documentary.

In July 2024, three girls were stabbed to death and eight others were injured in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, northwest England.

Swift struggles to talk directly about the attack in the documentary, trailing off to hold back tears as she tries to address it.

“I’m going to meet some of those families today,” she says, wiping away tears. “It’s gonna be fine, because when I meet them, I’m not gonna do this. I swear to God, I’m not gonna do this. I’m gonna be smiling.”

She met privately with some of the families affected before each of the five shows she performed at Wembley, sobbing on the sofa afterward and then collecting herself to go out to perform.

“It’s my job to be able to handle of these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform, that’s just the way it’s got to be,” she says.

Swift struggled to control ‘her nerves’ after Austria

In August 2024, organizers cancelled three concerts in Vienna, Austria after authorities said they foiled a terror attack which sought to target the event. “We dodged a massacre situation,” Swift said, later recalling that she was on a plane headed to Vienna when she learnt about the planned attack.

The close brush with such a nightmarish situation left Swift visibly shaken as she prepared to perform the next leg of her tour in London.

“I’m just having a physical reaction to my nerves, my hands are shaky,” she says to her mum while lying on a sofa shortly before her first show at Wembley.

“It’s just weird, I just have to get this first show over with. I’m just twitchy and fidgety. Get this show over with tonight, get back on the horse.

“Being afraid something is going to happen to your fans at any moment, this is a new challenge. I want to keep all 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 in you.”

She and Kelce find similarities in their professions

Although Swift’s fiancé Travis Kelce doesn’t appear on screen in these first two episodes, his presence is nonetheless there.

In one clip, the Kansas City Chiefs star calls her while she is in the back of a London taxi and each wonders how the other does their respective job before highlighting the similarities between their professions.

“You’ve got teammates, I’ve got teammates”, Kelce says, before Swift responds, “you’ve got Coach (Andy) Reid, I’ve got my mum.”

In another clip, she calls him immediately after the first London show to debrief him. “I’m so happy, I’m so relieved,” she says. “Baby, it’s like the crowd knew I needed a pick me up. They were wilder than I’ve ever seen.”

She went to extreme lengths to keep parts of the show secret

Partway through the Eras Tour, Swift released “The Tortured Poets Department,” and promptly added the new music into the show, a complicated undertaking which required the crew to rehearse during their only time off.

They found a “top-secret” rehearsal facility, going to great lengths to ensure that the new section would be a surprise when it was performed for the first time in Paris.

“That was a risk,” Swift says. “There was a danger that it could have felt like we shoehorned something in or people didn’t like the new show as much as the old show. I swear to God if I heard people online being like ‘I miss the old show,’ I was going to be like, ‘Oh my god, you have no idea how hard this was to do.’”

Other surprises – like Florence Welch, from Florence and the Machine, or Ed Sheeran making cameos at two of Swift’s shows – were also difficult to keep secret. Swift’s band leader remembers turning off the sound system as they rehearsed at Wembley Stadium with Welch so that none of the fans outside would hear and know beforehand.

By Issy Ronald