Taylor Swift and Abigail Anderson Berard have kept the same joke going for more than 20 years: talking to each other in “Napoleon Dynamite” voices. At a November 1 screening of “Toy Story 5” in New York City, Swift demonstrated the voice and explained why the movie’s friendship between Bonnie and Blaze reminded her of her best friend.
The pair met as freshmen at Hendersonville High School after Swift moved to Nashville at 14. “And the two of us, all we wanted to do was talk in Napoleon Dynamite voices,” she said during a Q&A with the film’s co-director and screenwriter, Andrew Stanton.
“We still do this,” Swift said. “It’s something our husbands have to put up with.”
Their friendship also became part of Swift’s music: she wrote about it in “Fifteen,” released in 2008. Abigail later appeared in the 2020 documentary “Miss Americana.” She married Charles Berard in 2022 and used lyrics from Swift’s “But Daddy I Love Him” to announce her pregnancy in 2024.
Swift said recognizing that kind of connection in the movie made it especially personal: “When you find that person who just completely sees you for the strange little genre that is you at your purest, that hit me so hard watching the film.”