Why Did Taylor Swift Make Her TV Debut in This Shocking ‘CSI’ Episode?

BEVERLY HILLS, CA - MAY 19: Singer Taylor Swift arrives at BMI's 57th Annual Pop Awards at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on May 19, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California.
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Taylor Swift is getting married, and we have to wonder if Haley Jones is going to be on the wedding’s guest list.

On Aug. 26, Swift and her longtime boyfriend, Travis Kelce, announced their engagement after two years of dating. But while Swift has a long, happy future ahead of her, that wasn’t the fate of the character she played in her first-ever acting role.

Oh yes. Do you remember how Taylor Swift once played a dead emo girl on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation?

In 2009, a 19-year-old Swift appeared on the 16th episode of CSI‘s ninth season. In the episode titled “Turn, Turn, Turn,” Swift first shows up as a corpse. She sports a 2000s black emo wig with a white streak and a sparkly stud nose piercing. Her name is Haley Jones, and she’s the adopted daughter of Mark and Nicole Jones, the owners of a seedy motel where the episode takes place.

 

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The episode’s story is told through multiple flashbacks as crime-scene investigator Nick Stokes (George Eads) encounters Hayley at the hotel while investigating a series of gruesome deaths.

Each time, Swift’s character is different: she’s a brown-haired science dork, a blonde who’s trying to be the popular girl at school, or a raven-haired emo.

As to why the grim episode was where young Swift made her acting debut, there’s an easy answer: she was a mega-fan of the series.

“For about three years I’ve been saying to everyone that my favorite show is CSI,” Swift told Rolling Stone at the time (h/t People). “The character Nick Stokes, it’s his crime that he deals with. It was really cool, because he’s my favorite character.”

“I’m black-haired, have a nose ring, earrings, spikes, combat boots…” Swift said of her character. “And you end up figuring out that there’s this whole back story, and that my parents had a child that ended up dying, and I was the second replacement child. And my mom never really loved me… and there are so many different intricate storylines that come into play.”

Spoiler alert: Haley Jones’s mother accidentally stabbed her (so much for “I can do it with a broken heart”).

However, don’t be fooled: the psychological levels of the story indicate it might not have been an accident. This is Taylor Swift, after all: everything she does has layers.

Swift has dabbled in acting since then, appearing in New Girl in 2013, 2014’s The Giver, the 2019 cinematic adaptation of Cats and in David O. Russell’s Amsterdam in 2022. But if she never steps on a movie or TV set again, at least she was able to cross one thing off her bucket list.

“All my friends know that my dream is to die on CSI,” Swift told MTV in 2009. “I’ve always wanted to be one of the characters on there that they’re trying to figure out what happened to.”

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