Melissa Madden Gray

Cats (2019 Film) - Griddlebone

BroadwayWorld.com Interview

Meow Meow, you're currently filming Cats with Dame Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, and Jennifer Hudson. Can you tell us about this project and your role in it?

I can tell you it's been quite extraordinary. Sir Ian McKellen is in it, as well, Idris Elba, James Corden, quite an extraordinary cast, and beautiful dances from the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, it's quite something. My role is Griddlebone, who is quite a mysterious cat because she appears in different ways from the West End Version to the Broadway version and in this film she appears in a different way altogether, but the poetry of T.S. Eliot is wonderful and this is an iconic piece of musical theatre and it's quite special to be a part of the film. One of my most gorgeous moments was when we were waiting to shoot and everyone was hysterically tired. I played a song for Robbie Fairchild, who was a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet and is now starring in An American in Paris on Broadway and the West End and in Paris and is one of the lead roles in Cats the movie. I played him the duet that we have on our album with Rufus Wainwright and it was so heavenly, I can't quite describe it. He popped the headphones in and he was all of a sudden dancing around the set. It made me incredibly happy and I think that's the response that I like everyone to have to the album when they listen to it-you just can't help dancing. That track is so joyful and there's so much orchestral joy in that and, of course, Rufus' beautiful voice. It's all about the bittersweet joys of love, I suppose, so that would be one of my favorite moments of Cats that I can speak about because it's not directly about Cats, but something joyful that happened onstage.