Taylor Swift has unveiled the first look at her “Patient Zero” music video ahead of The Life of a Showgirl‘s heavily anticipated encore.
CBS Mornings debuted an exclusive 13-second clip from the singer’s new video on Thursday, September 24, in which Swift, 36, teamed up with Colin Farrell and Dakota Johnson as the trio traipsed around a mysterious modern house. In a separate scene, Swift appeared to comfort Johnson, 36, at a gravesite in front of a headstone mourning an unknown daughter who lived from 1989 to 2022.
In another still, Swift appeared emotional with a giant engagement ring on display. (Swift married Travis Kelce in July, though the video ring did not appear to match the pop star’s custom Kindred Lubeck gold sparkler.)
CBS Mornings host Gayle King further revealed that the entire video will premiere during the 2026 MTV VMAs on Sunday, September 27, at which Swift will be honored with the inaugural Artist Director Honors. The pop star also earned 11 other nominations.
Swifties suspected that the singer-songwriter had started dropping hints about new music in recent days when she inserted a line in her recent Emmy Awards cameo that fans interpreted to be a code.
“I think what we’re gonna be looking for is hiding in plain sight,” she said in a Law & Order: SVU sketch with Emmys host Mariska Hargitay. “Saccharide, Aries, from the vineyard, north or south.”
More clues arose when a third piece of paper was added to a letter previously shared on her website. Swift continued to fuel the speculation by updating her Instagram bio to read, “And, baby, that’s sh0w business f0r y0u.”
Fans pieced together that the three zeros in Swift’s Instagram bio correlated with the third letter of the words spoken in Swift’s Emmys message. Once unscrambled, the coded message was determined to be “encore.”
Following the completion of another of her cryptic countdown clocks, Swift finally confirmed, “I’ve been impatiently waiting to tell you that my brand new single ‘Patient Zero’ will be out on September 25 (!!!!!!!!!!!!) and it’s available to pre-order now on my website for 24 hours. 0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣.”
Mariska Hargitay, Taylor Swift and her cat Olivia Benson appear during the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images
Swift had even more surprises for fans as she announced on Wednesday, September 23, that she will release an expanded edition of her 12th studio album — retitled The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore — on Friday. The album will feature four all-new bonus tracks — “Patient Zero,” “Cleveland!,” “Pink Clouding” and “Babylon.”
“About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind… You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history,” she wrote to fans. “I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with [producers] Max [Martin] and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs.”
She concluded, “I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made.”
Taylor Swift performs on stage during the “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” at Wembley Stadium. Kate Green/Getty Images
Swift had a change of heart about making a special edition of The Life of a Showgirl as she originally said on her debut “New Heights” podcast appearance in August 2025 that she had no plans to release bonus tracks. (She previously released remixed and acoustic versions of certain tracks last October.)
“With Tortured Poets Department, I was like here’s a data dump of everything I thought, felt, experienced in two or three years. Here’s 31 songs. This is 12,” she insisted at the time. “There’s not a 13th, there’s not other ones coming. This is the record I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time. I also wanted it to be every single song is on this album for hundreds of reasons, and you couldn’t take one out and it be the same album, you couldn’t add one and be… It’s just right.”
Jason Kelce is just like Us — he’s “knee-deep” in all the theories about Taylor Swift‘s new album, The Life of a Showgirl. Jason, 37, and his brother, Travis Kelce, recapped Swift’s recent “New Heights” appearance during the Wednesday, August 27, episode of their podcast. While giving an honest review of the upcoming record, Travis, […]
She added, “That focus and that kind of discipline with creating an album and keeping the bar really high is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. I tend to write lots and lots of music, so it’s a temptation to release lots of music. But oftentimes, I wanted to do an album that was so focused on quality and on the theme and everything fitting together like a perfect puzzle that these 12 songs for my 12th album, I feel like we achieved that and I’m really happy about that.”
The Life of a Showgirl shattered even lofty expectations, selling more than 3.47 million copies in its first week of release and going on top the Billboard 200 chart for 12 nonconsecutive weeks.
