All the Easter Eggs We Found in Taylor Swift’s ‘Patient Zero’ Music Video
3 min readTHE RUNDOWN
- Taylor Swift debuted her “Patient Zero” music video during the MTV VMAs.
- It included several Easter eggs, with fans realizing she gave away her cast list during her Emmys sketch.
- Swift shared what inspired her to tell the story in the video on Instagram.
Taylor Swift debuted her “Patient Zero” music video during the MTV VMAs—and of course, like most of her visuals, it had Easter eggs.
Fans quickly identified one giant one: The singer gave away the cast list during her Emmys Law & Order sketch. Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell starred in the video, while Cara Delevingne and Matthew Stafford made appearances.
Swift said in the skit, “I think what we’re gonna be looking for is hiding in plain sight: Saccharide Aries from the vineyard north or south.”
Swifties realized Farrell was attached to saccharide for his role in Sugar; Stafford is a L.A. Rams player, and the zodiac sign Aries is the ram; Delevingne’s last name is Old French for “from the vine,” so Swift hinted at her appearance with “from the vineyard”; and Johnson is linked to “north or south,” the two Dakota states.
Another Swiftie theorized that the Law & Order sketch was a hint that the music video would be crime-related:
Other fans focused on the tombstone scene, noting it is Swift’s second time creating a tombstone for herself, nearly 10 years after 2017’s “Look What You Made Me Do” music video.
By the grave, she has a wedding photo of herself, leading one fan to joke it was the closest we’ll get to seeing Swift as a bride since Swift hasn’t released any photos of her real-life July 3 wedding yet.
The tombstone’s date reads 1986 to 2022. Some Swifties pointed out that 6 is 9 upside down (Swift’s birth year is 1989), and Swift’s character who died is her age now, 36.
Swift hinted at one Easter egg she included: the gray home. “The house was a metaphor for the coldness of a relationship that’s faded and atrophied,” she wrote on Instagram.
She also shared some background on the story she chose to tell in “Patient Zero.”
“With the Patient Zero video, I got to explore the cinematic and literary genres I love so much,” she shared. “I wanted to incorporate elements of gothic ghost stories, true crime, psychological thrillers, all in a setting I hadn’t really shot in much.”
In October 2022, Swift gave a statement to The Washington Post explaining why she includes Easter eggs in her work.
She recalled her love of going through CD booklets as a kid. “I felt like some artists really leaned into their album packaging in a creative way,” she said. “The Chicks Fly album was my favorite because their photos depicted all the meanings of the word ‘fly’ in very theatrical ways. When I was 15 and putting together my first album, I wanted to recreate the experience I used to have for my fans in a reimagined approach. I decided to encode the lyrics with hidden messages using capital letters. That’s how it started, and my fans and I have since descended into color coding, numerology, word searches, elaborate hints, and Easter eggs. It’s really about turning new music into an event for my fans and trying to entertain them in playful, mischievous, clever ways. As long as they still find it fun and exciting, I’ll keep doing it.”
You can watch Swift’s full “Patient Zero” music video on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
This post will be updated with more Easter eggs as they’re spotted.