Taylor Swift Fangirls Over ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ and Backstreet Boys Mashup

Taylor Swift has heard the mashup of her song “Elizabeth Taylor” and the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” — and she heartily approves.

After BSB member AJ McLean posted a snippet of himself recreating the band’s original music video to the mashup, Swift, 35, shared her excitement in the comments section. “OH HI AJ OH MY GOD,” she wrote in capital letters.

McLean, 47, captioned the Instagram clip, “Come on now you know one of us had to!” In the video, he pretended to be rising up out of a coffin before opening his eyes and bopping along to the music. (The mashup was created by Lydia Getachew and is available to stream on Soundcloud.)

In the 1997 video, McLean and his bandmates — Nick Carter, Howie Dorough, Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson — each play a different spooky character after their bus breaks down and leaves them stranded at a haunted mansion. McLean played Erik, the titular character from The Phantom of the Opera, while Carter was a mummy, Dorough was Dracula, Littrell was a werewolf and Richardson was both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The song, one of BSB’s biggest hits, was cowritten and coproduced by Max Martin, who also produced Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. The video, meanwhile, was directed by Joseph Kahn, who went on to helm numerous videos for Swift, including “Bad Blood,” “Wildest Dreams,” “Blank Space” and “Delicate.”

“She had a cheat code, just spend as much as she can on the videos,” Kahn, 53, said during a July appearance on the “Ourselves” podcast. “She’s a boss. She’s a risk-taker. And you know what? In this business, people that are willing to throw it all on the line should be rewarded.”

He added, “She had a level of commitment that very few artists do. I would never have to wait for her … she’s always there. As soon as I needed to roll the camera, she would show up on set and shoot.”

More recently, Swift has directed many of her own videos, including “The Fate of Ophelia” from The Life of a Showgirl and “Fortnight” from The Tortured Poets Department.

Kahn, who’s also directed several full-length films, previously said that Swift taught him a lot about how to tell a story.

“She’s an incredible storyteller. Just because she writes songs, people don’t understand: Songs are not just things you listen to. Songs are things you experience; they’re stories that are told in three acts,” he told CBC Arts in 2024. “Every time I had to do one of her videos, I had to think really hard about her lyrics and how they were structured.”

The Backstreet Boys, for their part, created some of their most iconic work with Kahn, who also directed “Larger Than Life” and “Incomplete.” In 2017, Dorough, now 52, noted that the “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” video was a major risk for the group.

“It was definitely our most expensive video at the time — we had never spent that kind of money,” he told Billboard at the time. “It was over $1 million on the sets and everything, and a two-day shoot where Joseph didn’t even sleep. But it was amazing to see it all come together. You have a vision, but even with proper money you never know whether it’s going to come to life. And it did. It took on a life of its own. And it’s really cool to have people now claiming it to be iconic.”