Vote up the musicians who should have stuck to music.
Sometimes a crossover career works out well - Elvis Presley was both a successful musician and actor, and Justin Timberlake has found success in both areas as well. But not everyone has the same luck. Some of the most beloved musicians who light up the stage have failed to do the same once the cameras started rolling.
Everyone from Britney Spears to Mick Jagger has attempted to delve into the world of movies and TV, only to be told by fans and critics that they should stick to their day job. Whether it's Jennifer Lopez's performance in Gigli or the trainwreck that was Mariah Carey's Glitter, sometimes even the best musicians just don't end up translating to the big screen.
Here are some of the most notorious examples of singers turned actors.
Mariah Carey's disastrous turn at acting came in 2001 with the release of Glitter, a movie that was so widely hated that it's still talked about to this day. Critics were not kind to Carey, and blasted not only the movie but also her individual performance.
One review said that Carey had "the acting range of a parakeet," while another said that the movie was "so bad it's actionable." With another critic slamming the film as "total escapism without a shred of believability," it's easy to see why Carey's acting career didn't quite take off.
Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine tried his hand at acting in the 2014 film Begin Again, and then never did it again. Sure, it's a movie about musicians, but as one review put it, Levine "has absolutely no business acting in movies." Perhaps the worst part about his performance, as the reviewer noted, was that his character was almost identical to Levine himself.
"I don't know who told him he could act, but the man is a cardboard cutout of himself, struggling to make even blinking and turning his head look natural while playing a character who honestly should have just been named Adam Levine," the reviewer stated.
Levine revealed in an interview around the release of the film that he tried to take an acting class for the film but "didn't like it," and ultimately decided to simply hope he could pull it off.
If you're not aware that Vanilla Ice tried to be a movie star once, then we're sorry for ruining your ignorant bliss. Yes, Mr. "Ice, Ice, Baby," himself once starred in a film tragically titled Cool As Ice, and it was unsurprisingly not a hit.
At the time of its release 1991, the Washington Postcalled the movie "a cross between an after-school special and MTV video." The same review also took aim at Ice for his more well-known skills.
"Having established that he can't rap or dance, Vanilla Ice now adds acting to his resume," the review read.
Gene Simmons is an all-around annoying guy. He called Prince's death "pathetic," he declared rock n' roll dead, and he's done some pretty forgettable acting. He was fairly active on the big screen in the 80s, appearing in movies like Runaway and Never Too Young To Die, before seemingly returning to music and never quite looking back.
If his the length of his acting career and the impact it made on pop culture is any indication, it's probably best for Simmons to stick to making music and trademarking things.
Mick Jagger's dive into the world of cinema came in 1970 with an appearance in the cult film Performance just as The Rolling Stones were continuing their rise in popularity. The singer next starred in the film Ned Kelly as the titular character, but critics weren't buying his performance.
"With a beard that makes him appear more Amish than Australian, [Jagger] is, sadly, simply a dour renegade who rarely becomes the ‘wild colonial boy’ of the legend," the New York Timeswrote at the time.
He made a few more acting appearances in the years that followed, but Jagger has primarily kept to music since Ned Kelly. One of his most head-scratching cameo appearances was in the Jason Statham film The Bank Job, in which he played a bank teller.
Ringo Starr is one of the most groundbreaking drummers of all time, but the legendary Beatle had a short-lived and relatively unnoticed acting career for a moment as well. One of his most prominent acting roles came in the 1981 film Caveman, which Variety said was "as bad as you might imagine, and could have convinced the drummer that his movie career had run its course."
Starr, to his credit, likely realized that he wouldn't really be able to make a name for himself as an actor after all and effectively packed it in after Caveman.
"(That) all went downhill, and my recording career went downhill," he said. "I was too busy doing other stuff. And I realized that there’s enough actors; I’m a musician."
