The Promising State of the Actor-Musician
Graphic by Jessica Viscius; photos via Getty Images
by Bridget Minamore
Pop/R&B
Donald Glover is having a moment. A month after his alter-ego Childish Gambino released "Awaken, My Love!" to the best reception of his musical career, Glover found himself taking home two awards at the Golden Globes, winning for both his show "Atlanta" and his acting within it. The FX comedy-drama is a love letter to blackness, a funny but painful look at race relations in the South, and a chance to show off both dramatic chops and his musical taste for the actor and musician. Or is that musician and actor? Perhaps Glover's biggest achievement is the fact the trajectory of his success in both fields forces us to place the two words side by side. Glover manages to not merely do both, but do both well—and, at this point in time, simultaneously.
The actor who makes music, or the musician who acts, is certainly not a new phenomenon. Frank Sinatra won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1953's From Here to Eternity (a role that heralded the revival of both his acting and singing career), while Oscar winner Cher continues to release music and occasionally act 50+ years later. Separate from the all-singing and acting (and dancing) Broadway star, the musician/actor of the silver screen is not a byproduct of the stage. Anecdotally, it seems as though there are more musicians venturing into film careers than the other way around, maybe for the simple reason that it's easier to attempt to act than it is to try and create music. While acting is obviously a difficult skill to master, pretty much anyone can act (badly, at least) if they know their lines and repeat them on camera. Musical talent is arguably harder to fake; you either can play an instrument and hit the right notes, or you can't—the line is a little more defined, AutoTune be damned.
These days, musicians who become known as credible actors often reach the public's attention via roles that require musical talent (à la Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls, Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard), though that approach can also lead to, well, Glitter. Actors who make music—like Oscar winner and Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto—can find it difficult to shake off the "actor" tag despite mainstream musical success. In most cases, the famous artist's second venture is seen as a quirky side project at best (see: She & Him, Ryan Gosling's short-lived band Dead Man's Bones, Scarlett Johansson's Tom Waits tribute), and a wildly self-indulgent dip into an already crowded field at worst.
Even those actors and musicians who bypass accusations of artistic hubris and achieve success in their second field will still find themselves viewed primarily as one profession or the other. It is rare for the two sides of the creative career coin to be held in equal esteem, particularly at the same time. Instead, successful crossover artists tend to transition between acting and making music, with the peak of one career coinciding with a lull in the other. Rappers like LL Cool J, Ice Cube, and Ice-T have forged successful acting careers while continuing to make music to varying degrees, but only after the big musical successes of their youth were firmly in the rearview. Juliette Lewis' 2003-2009 run with indie rockers Juliette and the Licks coincided with smaller and fewer roles, and the longest period in her career without any acting awards. On a bigger scale, young West Philly rapper Will Smith used "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," a TV show he only took on to help pay a massive 1990 tax bill, to launch what would become a movie star's career. Smith has stopped making music in the years since, but his final Grammy nomination in 2001 was only a year before the first of his two Best Actor Oscar nods (for Ali and The Pursuit of Happyness). Now there's a whole new generation that only really knows him as a smooth-talking leading man with a famous family, not the late '80s rapper who doesn't curse.
So the question remains: Is it possible to sustain a career at the top of your game as both an actor and a musician? Alongside Donald Glover, this year the Golden Globes nominated Riz Ahmed, aka rapper Riz MC, for his acting in the HBO crime drama "The Night Of." The nomination came days after the release of Star Wars: Rogue One, where Ahmed plays the rebel pilot Bodhi Rook, and in the wake of both an inspired album with Swet Shop Boys and Englistan, a solo effort. Meanwhile, six-time Grammy nominee Janelle Monáe may not have released new music since 2015's "Yoga," but she also walked the Globes' red carpet after strong turns in two of the biggest films of the year, Moonlight and Hidden Figures.
Looking back over the last two decades, the biggest examples of juggling both simultaneously are folks like Harry Connick Jr., Jennifer Lopez, and Jamie Foxx. Connick Jr.'s relatively balanced paths are perhaps a privilege of coming from Broadway, and certainly it helps that he's a jazzy crooner as opposed to the most capricious whims of pop. His acting roles have rarely strayed from more wholesome corners of the mainstream—emotional TV movies, rom-coms, and cartoon voice work. His fellow "American Idol" judge J.Lo, whose breakthrough was playing slain singer Selena, has fared even better: Lopez holds the distinction of being the first woman to have a No. 1 album (2001's J.Lo) and film (The Wedding Planner) in the same week, and her career in both fields has continued relatively consistently since then.
Despite the occasional scathing review for Foxx, by commercial metrics, he's actually the most successful of the three at both. The "Gold Digger" guest's 1994 debut Peep This only peaked at No. 78 on the album chart, but the four LPs he released since winning his Oscar in 2005 have all hit the Top 10. Like Sinatra 50 years before him, Foxx used the momentum of an Academy Award to relaunch back into his musical talent—something moviegoers might not have even been aware of before Ray.
It hasn't always been like this. Less than half a century before J.Lo topped the box office and Billboard, the biggest stars of the screen were routinely singers as well, from Judy Garland in the '40s to Barbra Streisand in the '60s. The decline of the musician/actor coincides with the decline of the musician/actor's natural home: the movie musical. After the notorious Hays Code on "morality" in movies was abandoned in 1968, shifting demographics led to a sharp downturn for the cheery musicals that shaped post-war cinema. The live (not animated) musicals that were successful in the time directly following this often had an adult or ironic edge (Grease, Cabaret, Labyrinth, The Rocky Horror Picture Show). With the exception of Liza Minnelli (who navigated music and film as yet another Broadway baby), and Olivia Newton-John (a singer whose Grease success was followed by a series of TV movies and middling box-office flops), the stars of these musicals were firmly pigeonholed as either actors or musicians.
Since the 2000s, the movie musical has slowly risen as a vehicle for "serious actors" to flaunt their singing skills in exchange for Oscars. This year, the narrative around La La Land (and its 14 Oscar nominations) as some sort of awards season underdog by virtue of its musical status is a fiction. Since the turn of the century, over a dozen musicals or music-heavy biopics have been nominated at the Academy Awards, from Chicago to Moulin Rouge to Les Miserables. One big difference now is that proper triple threats are no longer cast as the leads—besides Queen Latifah's (great) supporting turn in Chicago, it's mostly A-list actors who retreat away from musical roles after collecting their awards.
Perhaps the future of the true actor/musician—someone who acts and releases music as independent endeavors—can be seen as a reflection of a new culture we're in, where creatives are generally doing more. Young people find themselves with not one creative job, but two or three or four, and it's no wonder that the art we are consuming comes from people doing the same. It's telling that many Disney and Nickelodeon stars of the past decade have been able to flit between acting and music with little fanfare. Even Hailee Steinfeld, who was nominated for an Oscar when she was just 13, was able to score a Top 40 hit with the tepid "Love Myself" in 2015 like it was nothing. An older generation of Disney kid, Justin Timberlake has been in a substantial amount of movies at this point, and no one ever says, "musician/actor Justin Timberlake." He had to choose a lane in his early career, and his voice made it for him.
Donald Glover's dual success is, in many ways, an anomaly. Over the years, he has steadily received higher and higher praise for both his music and his acting/writing. In our 2013 review of Childish Gambino's Because the Internet, Craig Jenkins described Glover as a "restless polyglot" who "could ultimately do well with a little less multitasking." The irony here, of course, is that the more he seems to do, the better he seems to do it. With Glover's success riding high alongside that of Ahmed and Monae's, perhaps we'll see more Golden Globe wins celebrated alongside Billboard chart-toppers in the future.
Artists In This Story
Swet Shop Boys
Riz MC