Taylor Swift’s Emmys Lookalike Eve Coffman On What It Was Like Being Mistaken For Taylor

Eve Coffman, a senior literature major at University of California, Santa Cruz, woke up Tuesday morning to a flurry of strange texts. A few nights before, she’d attended the Emmys for the first time with her mother Jodi Delaney, who runs the Television Academy Foundation. It was her first time going to the awards show, and she chose a pale pink Anthropologie dress to match her pink-tipped blonde hair. But apparently, in the 36 hours since the ceremony had ended, the internet had become convinced that Eve Coffman wasn’t Eve Coffman at all: she was actually Taylor Swift.

“I woke up at 6:45, and I had texts from all my high school friends telling me that they saw me on Snapchat, and then they looked it up and found articles from multiple sources about people being like, ‘Is Taylor Swift at the Emmys?'” Coffman told ELLE.com in a phone interview yesterday afternoon. “I don’t know how I missed it. I feel like this happened yesterday, but it was definitely startling.”

With her blonde hair and pink tips, Coffman looked suspiciously like Swift from afar during E!’s red carpet broadcast. She resembled Swift so much, in fact, that her presence sparked tweets and articles pondering whether Swift was making a surprise appearance at the Emmys.

Coffman outed herself as Swift’s lookalike on her Twitter yesterday, and her tweet has already racked up likes. Add in the fact that Coffman is a Taylor Swift fan, and it’s particularly surreal. “I’m just blown away by this, and it’s super cool to have such a icon of mine, someone I look up to and want to be like [be] the reason I’m becoming a meme,” she said.

Coffman spoke more to ELLE.com about what it’s like being mistaken for a pop star.

So, how did you choose your outfit for Emmys night?

Oh, my hair was pink already so I was like, I’m just going to get a pink dress because what else will go with pink hair? I have no idea. I found it at Anthropologie, and it’s my favorite thing that I own now. It is very Taylor Swift, I agree.

I think the consensus was like, “Oh wow, her hair matches her dress. It’s so pretty.” And I saw the photo, I was covering the Emmys, and I was just like, “From afar it does really look like Taylor.”

Yeah, I even said myself when I was getting ready I was like, “Wow, I really look like Taylor Swift,” because I know she dyed her hair pink for the Lover album, and I mean I’m a huge fan, so it’s super cool to be compared to her at all.

What has it been like today seeing all that coverage? How have you been processing this as you go from, “Oh wow, this happened,” to now?

I don’t know. I just feel like I don’t know what to do with the attention. I feel very humbled. I’ve been mistaken for her before, so this was crazy. I was reaching out to some—I know that there were fan pages that were posting about her on Twitter, so I reached out to a couple of them, and all of a sudden, I posted a picture of myself on Twitter, and a bunch of people have been liking it. I think it’s up to 600 likes now. I don’t know, it feels like a lot, but it’s exciting, I guess. It’s just really cool. I really love Taylor Swift, and I’m a singer/songwriter myself, so it’s just a weird coincidence.

If you were to meet Taylor, what would be the one thing you’d tell her?

Oh my God, I don’t know. I’d be so excited. I’d be like, please help me write my songs. I’d just tell her, I’m so grateful to you for being—I love her because she’s such a powerful female songwriter. I feel like there’s all this stuff about pop artists not being able to write their own songs, and they have a whole team and stuff. And I know she writes her own songs, and of course she has a team helping her, but I find it super inspiring that she’s continued to be her own person from day one and just she changes her music up. She’s just always consistently trying new things and is really cool. And I mean, that’s super inspiring just as a singer/songwriter myself.