We take a look at the times famous singers attempted to branch out into acting – to varying degrees of success.
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue 41 (March 2023).
If every actor secretly wants to direct, then every pop star not-so-secretly wants to act – and the variable success rate for previous attempts never puts them off. Over the last year, Björk, Harry Styles, Janelle Monáe, Taylor Swift and Jehnny Beth have all been seen in UK cinemas. That’s a diverse set of artists, and they got an equally diverse set of responses from audiences, from the triumph of Janelle Monáe in Glass Onion to the literal and metaphorical car crash of the Swift-starring Amsterdam.
All those artists, though, have got past the first hurdle of establishing an acting career: they have a body of work spanning multiple films. There are some pop stars who’ve only graced the silver screen once, and they’re not the one-hit-wonders you might expect. Join us as we assess the pop world’s most famous one‑time actors, and decide whether or not they should have given up the day job…
8 Mile (2002)
Marshall Mathers, aka Slim Shady, aka Eminem, aka the person early 2000s parents had nightmares about. His 1999 major label debut The Slim Shady LP gave him a level of global fame few, if any, rappers had previously achieved, as well as a boatload of lucrative controversy over violence, homophobia and misogyny in his lyrics. It was, he said, all a persona – so why not give acting a go?
The vehicle
Jimmy ‘B-Rabbit’ Smith, an aspiring white rapper from Detroit struggling to escape his alcoholic mother and dead-end life. The role could fairly be said to have the odd similarity with Eminem’s version of his life story, which he immortalised on songs like Cleanin’ Out My Closet. However, the history of pop cinema is littered with singers who’ve been given custom-made roles and still botched them – which makes it only fair that Eminem was praised so highly for his convincing, naturalistic performance. It helps that it’s directed by Curtis Hanson, fresh off two back-to-back masterpieces with LA Confidential and Wonder Boys, who makes the film gritty and convincing enough to make you forget that it’s basically Rocky with rapping.
Give up the day job?
He nearly did, after 2004’s ‘retirement’ album Encore. Afterwards, he was linked to films ranging from Southpaw to Wanted (whose comic-book source material features a distinctly Slim Shady-looking protagonist). Barring the odd cameo as himself – which we’re not counting here – he’s since stuck to music. Perhaps understandably: for all his acting was lauded, the most enduring legacy of 8 Mile was still his Oscar-winning theme song Lose Yourself.
Les Dogs (1990)
Kate Bush, a woman so ahead of her time she recently got to number one with a song written nearly 40 years ago. After an early smash hit with Wuthering Heights, a song written when she was 13, she released a series of now-classic albums which were a little too left-field for public tastes. 1985’s Hounds Of Love – from which the aforementioned delayed-action hit Running Up That Hill was taken – put her back on top, and 1989’s The Sensual World kept her there. Kate Bush being who she is, she chose to capitalise on this success by playing…
The vehicle
Angela in Les Dogs, an episode of the anthology series The Comic Strip Presents…, noted for giving early roles to comedians like Adrian Edmondson and Alexei Sayle, both of whom turn up here. The plot, if that’s the word, revolves around Peter Richardson, a car accident survivor who develops an obsession with Bush’s blushing bride after being mistaken for a wedding photographer. As if that’s not enough, a second English Civil War breaks out during the wedding, with family and guests picking sides and picking up guns. It’s dream-like, baffling and the final shot really should be a meme by now.
Give up the day job?
Nobody wants Kate Bush to release even less new music than she already does, but there’s something here. It must be said that Angela doesn’t have much to do other than be beautiful and distant, but Bush manages to find her own quietly knowing spin on the role. Maybe if her self-directed extended music video The Line, The Cross And The Curve was better-received, she’d have dabbled in movies more often.
Face (1997)
Damon Albarn, now famous for Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad & The Queen, but at this point solely known as the front-man of Blur. Their self-titled 1997 album abandoned the Britpop sound they pioneered, to the initial bewilderment of music critics who would then pretend they liked it all along when Song 2 (“woo-hoo!”) became the band’s biggest international hit. Later that year, Albarn would be seen as…
The vehicle
Face, a gangster drama by Antonia Bird starring Ray Winstone, Robert Carlyle and Lena Headey. Released a year or so before Guy Ritchie revived the commercial fortunes of the British gangster film, Face is a more serious affair: Carlyle’s Ray takes up robbing banks after becoming disillusioned with the prospects for a socialist government in the UK. There is still room for some dark humour, not least in the mostly over-the-hill crims’ reaction to Albarn’s cocky young thing Jason.
Give up the day job?
Throwing a first-time actor like Albarn into a cast of heavyweight actors with a wealth of experience playing gangsters might be seen as slightly cruel, and he was reportedly a bit rattled by some of Phil Davis’s more coruscating ad-libs on set. If he is a little green, it fits the character, and the lack of an immediate follow-up role has less to do with the quality of the film and more to do with two little words: woo, and hoo.
The Oscar (1966)
Tony Bennett, one of the most successful singers of big band jazz and traditional pop who ever lived. His first number one single was in 1951 and he remained successful right up until his retirement exactly 70 years later, thanks in part to collaborations with modern-day acolytes like Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse. Any career that long will have its ups and downs, and the mid-’60s was definitely a down time. With rock and roll pushing him out of the charts, he decided to play…
The vehicle
Hymie Kelly, a hapless showbiz hanger-on who watches his lowlife friend Frankie Fane become the biggest star in Hollywood. One of the most bizarrely misjudged movies of the 1960s, The Oscar probably single-handedly persuaded the Academy to be a bit more protective of their trademarks. The biggest problem is Stephen Boyd’s performance as the completely charmless Fane, bugging his eyes out and snarling in a bizarre parody of early method acting. But Bennett can’t get away that easily. He’s inescapable in the film, slathering scene after scene in some of the most deliriously awful voiceover ever written. “Like a junkie shooting pure quicksilver into his veins, Frankie got turned on by the wildest narcotic known to man – success!” What are you babbling about? Who injects mercury?
Give up the day job?
The Oscar is full of legendary cameos – Bob Hope, Ernest Borgnine, Edith Head – so Bennett can at least say he was embarrassed in fine company. It says something, though, that the 1970s would be even harder for Bennett than the 1960s were, and yet at no point did he think “You know what, I’ll make another movie.”
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Dennis Wilson, who along with his brothers Brian and Carl formed the core of the 1960s’ greatest band, The Beach Boys (sorry, Beatles fans). Dennis was the more rebellious, adventurous member of the group, writing some of the band’s rockier songs, being the only one who could actually surf, and – less commendably – briefly befriending Charles Manson. By 1971 he was shouldering more songwriting duties after Brian’s mental breakdown, but he still found time to star as…
The vehicle
‘The Mechanic’ in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, a pop star vehicle in the most literal sense of the word. The Mechanic and The Driver make their laconic way across America, scratching a living by competing in drag races, with no particular goals in life or outside influences until they meet Laurie Bird’s similarly anonymous hitchhiker. The nameless characters are of a piece with Peckinpah collaborator Rudy Wurlitzer’s sparse, existential screenplay, and it’s this quality – along with the memorably ambiguous ending – that makes it a key text in the cinema of burn-out and post-hippie disillusionment. Far out.
Give up the day job?
Dennis Wilson’s one solo album, 1977’s Pacific Ocean Blue, is regarded by many Beach Boys fans as the best solo record by any of the group, so you wouldn’t want him to give it up, exactly… but one or two more films like this would have been a treat.
Crossroads (2002)
Britney Spears, defining teen-pop idol of her time, launched her career with …Baby One More Time in 1999. The song’s notorious video, and the media’s relentless focus on her virginity and her relationship with *NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake (whatever happened to him?) made it hard for her to reinvent her image as she matured, with tragic consequences explored in documentaries like Framing Britney Spears. By 2002 she’d released three albums, all of which produced multiple hit singles – making movies an obvious next move.
The vehicle
Lucy, a girl on a road trip with her two friends in search of their childhood dreams. Crossroads was written by a young Shonda Rhimes but based on a concept Britney herself came up with, a fact left out of the credits to forestall charges that Crossroads was a vanity project.
That didn’t stop film critics using it as an easy target of a punch-bag anyway, and it received a predictable slew of nods from the Razzies too. Watched today, it’s certainly clichéd, and its sexual politics might be described as George W Bush-era (just as the wider media was with Spears’s own personal life, the film is absolutely obsessed with Lucy’s virginity). Yet, it has a fine supporting cast going for it – including early appearances from Zoe Saldana and Justin Long. For all the help it got her in the face of the baying media, Spears’s performance is as sincere as the movie’s touching take on female friendship.
Give up the day job?
Britney Spears should probably be allowed to do whatever she wants to do.
With the notable exception of Lady Gaga, most modern pop stars take Damon Albarn’s approach to acting: avoid out-and-out star vehicles in favour of supporting roles, so if it goes wrong, at least people won’t solely blame you. No doubt the reaction to turn-of-the-millennium films like Crossroads, Spice World and Mariah Carey’s Glitter shaped this consensus, and we’ve probably been spared some absolute turkeys as a result. But it also means we’ll never get another fusion of music and movie as effervescent as A Hard Day’s Night, or a dual career as rewarding as David Bowie’s. Pop stars should start taking risks with acting roles again; if it all goes wrong, as the above list proves, you only have to do it once.
