Not ready for the Jellicle Ball. James Corden is one of many famous faces in the new adaptation of Cats, but he wasn’t lined up at the box office to celebrate the movie’s big release.
The Late Late Show With James Corden host, 41, stopped by the U.K.’s Zoe Ball Breakfast Show on Monday, December 23, ahead of the BBC’s Gavin & Stacey reunion special on Christmas Day. When host Zoe Ball pressed Corden about the film’s less-than-stellar reviews, the Cats star couldn’t help but laugh.
“I haven’t seen it,” Corden admitted. “I’ve heard it’s terrible … I’ll catch it one day, I imagine.”
Later, Corden’s Gavin & Stacey costar Larry Lamb joked, “It’s got some brilliant reviews.”
The late-night host stars as Bustopher Jones in the Tom Hooper adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s absurd Broadway classic. Taylor Swift, Jason Derulo and Rebel Wilson also appear as oddly-sized CGI felines who are all competing for the chance to be reborn. The movie has dominated headlines this holiday season, but was widely panned by both critics and fans once it finally hit theaters on December 20. Some viewers even noticed a number of editing errors on the big screen, including Judi Dench‘s very human hand appearing front and center in one scene.
With so many A-listers filling up the bill, it’s surprising that Cats didn’t turn out to be the box office smash it was marketed as. However, some of the big names involved in the movie weren’t even all that familiar with the infamous musical before signing on to the project. In July, Idris Elba struggled to explain the film’s plot during an appearance on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
“Oh wow, way to throw me under the bus there,” the 46-year-old actor teased Stephen Colbert. “It’s a classic. It’s a big musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber. I guess it’s about a cat.”
Elba, who stars as the sinister Macavity in Cats, continued: “It’s one cat’s journey towards what is essentially cat heaven, and that idea is that we all aspire to get toward cat heaven. There’s this young cat and she gets taken on this story on how to get to cat heaven or what you should do to get into cat heaven.”
