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Stage Fright: Celebrating the worst performances by musicians in recent films

Countless lists are made every day of the best movie roles filled by musicians, and lord knows we could fill up several lists of our favorite performances (here’s a deep cut and a hot take: we actually loved Norah Jones in Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights). But very few talk about the worst performances made by musicians in modern film.

With Sir Paul McCartney making an appearance in this Friday’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, we thought we’d gather up what we think are some pretty horrific film appearances made by famous musicians in the past 10 years or so.

From a dressed-down diva and an aged rock legend to “the king” and a CGI abomination, there’s proof that not everybody can make the transition to the silver screen.

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Mariah Carey, Precious

Hoo boy, we wish we could have put Glitter on this list, but that piece of shit came out 17 years ago, and you now feel just so terribly old. We’re going to amplify that feeling by sharing with you a clip from Carey’s performance in Lee Daniels’ Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, which came out in 2009 and OH GOD. Anyways, Carey’s the absolute opposite of her glamorous role in her previous film effort, as she’s intentionally dressed down in order to make her “blend in” and look like all of us plebeians with our baggy eyes and tiny little mustaches. And she’s just kind of… bland (though it’s good fodder for Monique, as seen in the clip above), which means she sort of sticks out like a sore (mustachioed) thumb in a movie that’s so exaggerated. It’s just not realistic to see her here, and it totally breaks any concentration you had while watching it — it’s not a character you’re watching on the screen, it’s Mariah Carey Playing A Social Worker, and that’s kind of a disaster for a movie like this.

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