10 Perfectly Weird David Bowie Movie Performances

2. Thomas Jerome Newton - The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976)

For many, this is Bowie€™s signature role, taken from the mid-seventies period that music aficionados usually determine represents his finest, most immutable body of work. No role typified Bowie€™s alien aspect so much as the first€ the one where he played a genuine extraterrestrial. Nic Roeg€™s bizarre, odd little drama casts Bowie as €˜Thomas Jerome Newton€™, an alien on Earth to bring water back to his home planet, stricken by a terrible drought. Yet, for all the science-fiction trappings of the film, this is a film about losing oneself, the process of the stripping away of innocence. Using information culled from his own society€™s technology, Newton intends to make an extraordinary amount of money with which to finance the return trip to save his wife and children. But the further he pursues this process of incorporating himself into the economy and the culture of America, the further he drifts from the goals that drove him to do so. Nic Roeg wanted someone who didn€™t appear to be an actor, who had that otherworldly affect I€™ve talked about. Unafraid of Bowie€™s lack of experience (he€™d coaxed an equally unforgettable performance from Mick Jagger in€ well, Performance), Roeg delivered a typically dislocated, non-linear and surreal film in which Bowie perfectly portrays the dissociation caused by immersing yourself in something that isn€™t you, and losing that sense of yourself in the process. Bowie had felt something similar after becoming a rock star, achieving the fame he€™d sought for years, and the isolation and dissonance that came with it. The Man Who Fell To Earth would come to represent the pinnacle of his career as an actor for cineasts and Bowiephiles the world over. However, for the rest of the world, there would be another film that would perfectly represent Bowie on film...