The pop star-to-actor pipeline

After pulling crowds at cinemas for the last two months, Wicked: For Good has landed on digital platforms for those who are curious to see how the Wizard of Oz origin story turned out, but not so eager to leave the couch. As you may have gathered from the tepid reviews – Wendy Ide’s included – it’s more of the same but less: a second act stretched to feature length with washed-out pastel spectacle and mostly unmemorable songs.

With Cynthia Erivo’s misunderstood Wicked Witch of the West treading water after completing her character arc in the first film, it’s Ariana Grande, as her pink, perky but progressively disillusioned counterpart, who has more to do: her performance, balancing brittle comedy with heartbreak, gives the film what pep it has. Early scepticism over the pop princess’s casting has long been forgotten. She’s hot Hollywood property now, though the announcement of her first post-Wicked film project – Focker-in-Law, a fourth instalment in the deathless Meet the Parents franchise – doesn’t set the pulse racing.

No matter: the pop-star-to-movie-star path usually has bumps along the way. Just ask Cher, who debuted with a handful of disposable bubblegum movies in the 1960s (including the execrable flower-child road movie Chastity, ripped on YouTube for the morbidly curious) before retiring her big-screen dreams for more than a decade.

In the 80s, she re-emerged as an improbably prestigious movie star, first winning an Oscar nomination for a fine dramatic turn opposite Meryl Streep in Silkwood, and four years later winning the prize outright for the delicious romcom Moonstruck – by which time she’d so successfully erased memories of her earlier screen work that she even thanked Streep in her speech for co-starring in “my first movie”. Who dares contradict a diva? Strangely, Cher held off making a musical until 2010’s swiftly consecrated camp classic Burlesque, aggressively wrestling the spotlight from debuting pop star Christina Aguilera, who hasn’t headlined a movie since.

Lady Gaga began her film career proper with the bespoke vehicle A Star Is Born – playing a pop star with a voice like her own, but a different enough character to persuade viewers of her acting chops – and was luridly entertaining as a venomous, non-singing prima donna in House of Gucci, though nobody much wanted to see her as an emo trainwreck in Joker: Folie à Deux. Sometimes, when your first film proves such an indelible, unrepeatable riff on your musical persona, it’s best to leave it there: after being put through the Lars von Trier wringer to brilliant but harrowing effect in Dancer in the Dark, Björk showed little interest in cinema thereafter, though she did recently pop up in a mystic cameo in Robert Eggers’s The Northman.

A sui generis presence on screen, David Bowie made more films than you likely remember, though his best roles – whether as a literal alien in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth or as nightmare fuel in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth – capitalised on the otherworldly quality that made him so riveting in the pop sphere. That’s often a better approach than trying to play down the celebrity fairy dust: Harry Styles felt ill-cast as a tight-jawed incel in Don’t Worry Darling and as an angstily closeted copper in My Policeman, two 2022 releases that put the brakes on his film career.

There’s no shame, after all, in giving up on movie stardom: Britney Spears knew which side her bread was buttered: the wispy teen movie Crossroads wasn’t going to suffice. Madonna hacked away at it for years, even lucking into a Golden Globe for her one-off musical role in Evita, but it took collaborating with then-husband Guy Ritchie on the lousy Swept Away for her to let the dream die. As for the imperious Beyoncé, generally accustomed to being the best at things, starring in Dreamgirls and watching all the glory go to Jennifer Hudson must have dampened her enthusiasm for an acting career that ended ignominiously with the 2009 catfight thriller Obsessed. What’s an Oscar to 35 Grammys, anyway?

Photographs by Universal Pictures/Alamy