10 Musicians Who Are Actually Good Actors
2. Bjork
The Icelandic enigma has acted in only a handful of films, but she brings the same mysterious, ineffable presence to the screen as she does to her music. Before her solo career took off she acted in acclaimed Scandinavian drama The Juniper Tree, and she is cast as a witch in Robert Eggers’ (The Lighthouse, The Witch) upcoming movie.
She earns her place on this list, though, through the sheer brilliance of her role in 2000’s Dancer In The Dark, Lars Von Trier’s gut punch of a film, Bjork plays Selma, a Czech woman living in poverty in 1960s America. It’s a bleak tale of desperation and the suffocating unfairness of life, with Bjork putting in one of the most sympathetic and heartbreaking performances ever seen.
Bjork also wrote and performed the film’s soundtrack, much of it on screen. It’s the kind of otherworldly acting job that a “full time” actor would be unlikely to achieve. We’re not used to seeing someone like Bjork, nor a character like Selma.
The working conditions with the famously spiky Von Trier were reportedly horrendous, but the unpleasantness of life on set combines to make the performance even more powerful.