Carly Rae Jepsen’s new music video for “Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor” isn’t a typical pop-girl clip. “Dance Floor” is the third single off her upcoming album, Day and Night, out September 18, and to bring it to life, Jepsen tapped playwright Jeremy O. Harris as director. He made, essentially, a short film starring recent Tony winner Alden Ehrenreich. Harris connected to the song immediately because of his own life. “I had just been in it really deep with my partner that month, in the nitty-gritty of the complexities of being in love and wanting to stay in love,” he says. “I immediately felt attached to the song and the sentiment that you don’t want to be left on the dance floor in the middle of the complexities of sharing a life with someone.”
The video follows Ehrenreich as he tries to win back an already-gone girlfriend, played by Olivia Washington. It opens on him acknowledging his money troubles and trying to work things out with her over the phone. “I know I haven’t been able to provide the life I promised you, the life that I promised us,” Ehrenreich tells her. “But I’m asking you, I’m begging you to just stick it out.” A rejected Ehrenreich spends the rest of the video dancing it out in front of Jepsen, who is serenading an almost-empty dance hall. He ends the video crying and collapsing. “We talk a lot about male loneliness, so I wanted it to star a man stuck on a dance floor,” Harris says. “It feels so obvious that Carly would be waiting on the dance floor. Something beautiful to see is a man trying and failing to woo a woman with a dance.”
Casting Ehrenreich was natural. He and Harris have had a “work flirtationship,” as Harris calls it, for a long time. “I wanted a straight man who will be sad and hot at the same time, and I think Alden has a face that can do that really well,” Harris says. “I thought to myself, Is there any universe where he’ll say ‘yes’?” Harris sent him essentially a “you up?” text. Ehrenreich, who’d never been in a music video before, got the script and signed on immediately.
It was important for Harris to bring on downtown choreographer Marc Crousillat to create character-based movement for Ehrenreich. “Knowing that Mark was such a nerd and I was such a nerd, we felt how much of a nerd Alden was come out,” Harris says. They took inspiration from Denis Lavant in the final scene of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail and from a Ralph Lemon–choreographed performance where the performer Okwui Okpokwasili cries. “I wanted the DNA of downtown dance, but I wanted it to still be a man who had never been to MoMA PS1 or NYLA,” Harris says.
Harris spent a significant portion of the budget to shoot on film, and it paid off. “When we did our first camera test with the 16 mm., my director of photography, Todd Banhazl, told me to make sure that we didn’t put basically any makeup on him because his face dances with light so well,” Harris remembers.
Photo: Krissy Rivard
Jepsen brought her husband, Cole M.G.N., to set, and he ended up appearing in the background of the dance-hall scenes. Between shots, she would check the monitors and hang out with her 6-month-old. Harris describes her as being both an excited collaborator and remarkably egoless about not being at the center of the process. “I can imagine if I were to tell a lot of pop stars, ‘I’m making this music video and you’re a Lynchian ghost inside of it,’ they’d say, ‘I need it to cut to me every five seconds,’” Harris says. “There was a version of the music video that was just going to be one shot, and she was so down.” Harris and his editor, Pete Ohs, the filmmaker who made the acclaimed 2026 movie Erupcja, starring former Jepsen collaborator Charli XCX, ultimately decided against that technique because they wanted to avoid being too heady.
There’s also another version of the video — which Harris calls the “late-night cut,” that he says will be released at some point. It’s sultrier. “When you see her with that red hair, it’s Jessica Rabbit–y or something, especially with the red dress,” Harris says. “I was like, Let’s lean into that.”
Looking back, Harris’s only regret from the filming process was that he didn’t make any TikToks with Ehrenreich, Jepsen, and Washington. “Sadly, when you’re directing two music videos in a day,” he explains, “you’re required to focus on too many things to have time to do content farming.”
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