Background Perry started filming for the video on September 30, 2011. Filming ended on October 2, 2011. The video was shot at the Lima Residence, a contemporary home located in
Calabasas, an affluent city in
Los Angeles County, California. Mexican actor
Diego Luna plays Perry's boyfriend in the video. Photos from the set surfaced online, showing Perry wearing a conservative long-sleeved dress as well as sporting gray hair and prosthetic face wrinkles. The video was directed by
Floria Sigismondi, who previously directed the video for "
E.T." The music video premiered on November 11, 2011. On November 4, 2011, a teaser for the video was released, narrated by
Stevie Nicks. Nicks provides the elderly woman's voice, speaking about the past and her desire to go back for one day. The video contains scenes of Katy Perry and her past boyfriend (Luna) fighting, intertwined with scenes of them in love. She is later shown as a nostalgic, elderly woman dressed conservatively and standing by a fence looking into the distance. A seven-minute extended version of the video was shown on November 11, 2011, exclusively at select advance screenings of the motion picture
My Week with Marilyn (2011).
Synopsis Released on November 11, 2011, the video begins with an elderly woman (Perry) entering her modernistic home. She walks past her husband (played by
Herman Sinitzyn), who asks her "How was it?", to which she responds by simply saying "It was fine.", hinting that the two are in a loveless marriage. While making herself a cup of coffee, the elderly woman, unhappy with her present situation, begins to think about her colorful past when the song begins: her younger self with her artist boyfriend (Luna) paint portraits of each other. The elderly woman continues to reminisce about her past in her bedroom alone as the song plays: the happy girl and the boyfriend dress up wildly, take Polaroid photos of each other, dance at a stranger's wedding, and give each other a makeshift tattoo. As the woman's younger self appears to her older self and both sing the bridge, we see the younger self and the boyfriend get into an argument; she has a creativity block and is unable to paint anything, so he forces her to paint, and in response she splashes red paint on his painting. He leaves angrily and drives away in a
Ford Mustang to blow off steam from the fight. The younger version is shown in her older self's closet, crying and singing while the boyfriend is seen driving in his car. At the same time in the present, the older woman is shown driving out of her garage in a similar type of car as the boyfriend is driving in the flashback. While driving, the boyfriend opens the sun visor above him and finds the veil of the dress the younger version of Perry had worn at the wedding. He stares at the veil, hinting that he decides to make up with her. But he is too distracted by the veil and does not notice the large boulders on the road from a small rock slide. He swerves to avoid the rocks and accidentally drives off a cliff, dying in the subsequent crash without getting a chance to make up. Meanwhile, the woman's younger self collapses at the same time (possibly representing the death of her colorful youth and personality). The song ends as the sounds of the car violently rolling down the cliff are heard. As Johnny Cash's cover of "
You Are My Sunshine" plays quietly in the background, the woman's older self is revealed to have driven to that same spot where the boyfriend had died. She walks up to the edge of the cliff where the boyfriend (either a ghost or a hallucination) appears before her on the other side of the fence; the two hold hands, revealing matching tattoos on their hands. When the older woman snaps back to reality, the Johnny Cash music stops suddenly and the boyfriend vanishes. Saddened, the elderly woman turns back and silently walks away from the cliff to return home as the screen fades to black.
Reception Jillian Mapes of
Billboard commented that the video was "beautifully-shot" and praised the interesting plot. A writer of
Rolling Stone wrote: "It's a cute clip for a sweet song, but the heavy-handed aging makeup is hard to get over." Erin Strecker from
Entertainment Weekly compared the video with
Titanic (1997) and
Rihanna's
video for "
We Found Love". Strecker also noted that the video was more "tragic" than he was expecting from Perry. Jocelyn Vena of
MTV News said: "Katy Perry's moody, contemplative clip for 'The One That Got Away' perfectly encapsulates both the joy of falling in love and the heartbreak of letting go. It travels through time and space and recalls the story of Perry's one that got away."
Consequence of Sounds Chris Coplan called the video a "little more somber" than the videos Perry made for "E.T." and "
Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)".
Other versions The seven-minute
director's cut version of the music video was shown exclusively at select advance screenings of the motion picture
My Week with Marilyn on November 11, 2011. On January 17, 2012,
Electronic Arts announced that they would be teaming up with Perry to help promote their new
expansion pack for
The Sims game franchise called
The Sims 3: Showtime, which sees the release of a limited collector's edition that contains in-game content based on herself. An official music video for "The One That Got Away" featuring Perry as a Sim was uploaded on EA's YouTube channel. The storyline shows a female Sim and a male Sim falling in love and getting married. One day, the male Sim collapses in the bathroom floor, he is taken to the hospital and then dies. His wife is then seen mourning at his funeral. Suddenly, she is transported "to another life", Katy Perry's Candyfornia featured in her "
California Gurls" music video, where her love interest is still alive and well; they eventually reunite and kiss. It also features most of the in-game content that will be included for the collector's edition of
The Sims 3: Showtime and in the stuff pack ''The Sims 3: Katy Perry's Sweet Treats''. As of 2023, the video has reached 1 million views. ==Live performances and other versions==