Cats school and singing with Taylor: Why Francesca Hayward swapped the Royal Ballet for 2019's most-discussed film

As a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, Francesca Hayward is a seasoned performer.

But as she prepares for the release of her first ever film, the screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, she is having to adapt to a different kind of spotlight - the more intense glare that comes with a starring role in one of this year’s biggest releases. “I’m not used to doing this much talking as a ballerina,” she says by way of apology at the start of our interview. “I almost lost my voice earlier.”

When it comes to Cats, there is certainly plenty to talk about. When the first trailer was released in July, it became a viral sensation, showing stars including Judi Dench, Taylor Swift and Idris Elba as uncannily anthropomorphised felines. Amid all the Twitter chatter about “digital fur technology” (and whether it was a force for good or evil), the divisive clip also introduced Hayward - a huge name in the ballet world - to a brand new audience.

As the wide-eyed kitten Victoria, a dancing role in the stage production that has been expanded for the film, she guides viewers through a topsy turvy world where cats gather at night to decide which of them gets a chance to be re-born (or something like that).

It’s a part that has a sweet significance for the 27-year-old, who joined the Royal Ballet School in 2003 and started dancing with the company in 2010. “When I was much younger, I used to have a video of the stage production, so I’d dance around my living room and I’d always play Victoria,” she smiles. “It was my favourite part.”

When she heard that Tom Hooper, who directed the 2013 film version of Les Miserables, was holding auditions for a big screen version of Cats (which Hayward is yet to see in the theatre - she is “quite particular about musicals”), the dancer “felt like [she] had nothing to lose by just giving it a go.”

In most film musicals, songs are recorded in the studio during pre-production, allowing actors to lip sync when the cameras are rolling. Hooper, however, insisted on live singing to lend his Les Miserables a more authentic feel, and stuck with the same technique for Cats. For Hayward, who appears in scenes alongside musical veterans like Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift, this was initially “terrifying.”

“Yeah… [I’m] not a trained singer,” she laughs when asked what it was like to sing alongside Hudson, who won an Oscar for her turn in Dreamgirls. “I hadn’t sung before apart from at school or just for fun and they made it clear by the last audition that this role was pretty huge.”

Working with a vocal coach, she started to learn “to open my voice up - I was literally learning about the voice from scratch again. It’s like a muscle on the body, just like how I keep muscles in shape to dance. I didn’t realise how vulnerable and unpredictable it could be. I’m quite relaxed - I know it’s important not to get too uptight about things as a dancer, but when it came to my voice I realised that everything you eat, everything you drink affects it. So I got a vocal steamer, I was drinking tea the day before... ”

It is clear that Hayward takes her craft - whether it be ballet training, singing lessons or learning to move like a cat - very seriously indeed. Along with the rest of the cast, she attended “cat school” to get a better grasp on all things feline. “Tom Hooper never wanted us to be literally like, licking a paw, doing a cat impression,” she explains, in contrast to her co-star Rebel Wilson’s recollection of the experience. “[The lessons were] just to be a bit more feline. We’d look at cat videos, study their behaviour, their anatomy - they don’t have knee joints and their shoulders are very different.”

During filming, she would still “squeeze” in ballet classes before heading to the set, getting up to practice at 6.30 in the morning. The “mental strength” she has built through dancing proved just as important as her physical stamina during long days on set, she says, and stopped her from “freaking out” when she was called upon to film scenes with veteran stars like Elba and Dench.

There were, however, a few moments when it was impossible not to feel starstruck. It’s hardly a rarity to hear actors claim that they “can’t believe” their success, but Hayward speaks earnestly of the “surreal” experience of having Taylor Swift take her aside to sing her a rough version of Beautiful Ghosts (the new track which Swift and Lloyd Webber wrote for Hayward to perform in the film) and it’s clear that she means every word.

“I still find it completely amazing, just to have that said back to me that they’ve made me a song,” she says. “At the end, when she’d sung it to me very beautifully, she very sweetly asked me if that song would be OK. Imagine - ‘Go back and write me a better one!’”

The day that Ian McKellan and Judi Dench joined rehearsals had the feel of a royal visit, she recalls, with the rest of the cast lining up to pay their dues. “It was like the royal family had arrived,” she says. “We just started acting really weirdly, forming this weird line almost to go and bow to the king and queen. We just wanted to, like, shake their hand or touch them. It’s a weird sense of wanting to talk to them, but you’re too shy to talk to them. Usually, I’m quite cool about that, I’m a bit shy about going up and talking to people anyway. But by the end of it, we just realised that they’re both absolute legends and the most wonderful people.”

Working with such established talent has, Hayward says, “opened her eyes to acting” - though ballet is, she notes, a “short career” that she will “make the most of.” Characteristically tentative about her future in film (“It only feels like it’s not too crazy to say this because I’ve just worked with Tom Hooper…”) the dancer says she would be keen to work with a female director soon, citing Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig as dream collaborators. She is excited to see the latter’s new version of Little Women when she has some time off over Christmas - a rarity, as she usually dances throughout the festive season.

Cats will finally make its way into cinemas on December 20, but Hayward admits that she won’t go out of her way to discover the critical consensus - her own critique is enough. “I already don’t read reviews, I don’t seek them out,” she says. “Sometimes my family will tell me if there’s a nice one. I always critique myself but I’m realistic - I know I can do better but I’m never that hard on myself, either. I can let things go.”

Whatever the verdict, she hopes that the film will make her ballet work more accessible. “Ballet doesn’t get this kind of mainstream recognition, but that’s something I’m hoping that the film could change,” she says. “I really hope that someone watching the film might be inspired to come and watch a ballet performance, if maybe they’d never thought about doing that. That would be really cool.”

Cats is out in cinemas on December 20.