Okay you're a singer... Can you act?

Mitch Hedberg used to tell a joke about comedians who were given roles on TV shows, saying that it was unfair that they had spent all their time working on jokes and now they were expected to do something that was related to their job but not the same. He said, “that's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’" It’s common for stand up comedians to make their way into acting – Hedberg was on That 70’s Show, George Carlin was in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and a couple Kevin Smith movies, Lewis Black, John Stewart, Richard Pryor, and several others have made the transition. It is a leap to go from telling jokes to acting, but there is a connection. What is even more interesting, I think, is when a singer transitions to acting.
Perhaps the best early example of a singer going from the stage to the screen is Frank Sinatra. By the early 1950’s, Sinatra was in decline. The previous decade had seen him launched to superstardom, but as he grew into his thirties and he suffered vocal illnesses, Sinatra fell into a deep depression. Dropped from his record label, he tried to commit suicide in 1952. What turned his life around was the film From Here to Eternity, a World War II film for which he earned the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. With the success of this film, he got his career back on track, and went on to record some of his best music. He remained in the acting world as well, in films such as The Manchurian Candidate, Ocean’s 11, Guys and Dolls, and received a nomination for the Best Actor Oscar for The Man with the Golden Arm.
More recently, hip-hop artists have begun to explore film as an alternative medium for their storytelling. The most well known of these films is probably 8 Mile starring Eminem. The film is a semi-biographical look at his life in Detroit, living in a mobile home and working at a car factory. The film makes use of his music, and the final scene of the film has him showing off his rapping abilities in a battle with another rapper. Although it was a successful film, he has stayed out of acting ever since. A couple years later 50 Cent starred in Get Rich or Die Tryin’, another semibiographical film. The film was not as successful as Eminem’s, as the plot and the acting are one dimensional, and show absolutely no character growth over time. Not every film starring a rapper has been based on the artist’s life – about ten years ago, Method Man and Redman made a film where they smoke pot mixed with the ashes of their dead friends, and then take the SATs. They end up getting perfect scores, and get accepted to Harvard. The film, How High, although void of any artistic merit, is quite entertaining.
There are plenty of other examples. One of my favorite singers is Henry Rollins, front man of the mighty Black Flag and the eponymously titled Rollins Band. He has appeared on screen a number of times, such as in The Chase, as a recurring character in the TV show Sons of Anarchy, and as a cop in the David Lynch film Lost Highway. David Lynch often brings in musicians to act, and convinced Sting to play the antagonist in the film Dune. These musicians already have an established fan base, so they can attract an audience that might not normally want to see these movies. Because their talents lay in singing, and not acting, filmmakers will often write roles to fit their sensibilities. The part of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige was written specifically for David Bowie, and director Christopher Nolan was so insistent that Bowie be in his movie that he appealed to him in person after he first turned it down. Terry Gilliam is a fan and friend of Tom Waits, and wrote the part of the Devil specifically for him to play in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
The list goes on – Elvis Presley, Jennifer Lopez, Ice T, Cher, Whitney Houston, Madonna…. I think by now I have gotten the point across – which is that if you make it as a singer, somebody will eventually ask you to act. The last person I want to talk about is a musician who decided to take a different route. Rob Zombie, who, as the name suggests, writes music that is supposed to scare the listener, entered the film world as a director instead of an actor. His movies, like his music, are incredibly violent and definitely in the slasher genre, and although I am not a fan of his music, I do enjoy his films. They are full of gratuitous violence and classic film references – what’s not to love? For the most part, his films are mindless, but I was terrified during The Devil’s Rejects, and liked it enough to buy the DVD.