When I heard the rumours that Billie Eilish may make her film acting debut in an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, my initial reaction was one of weary exasperation.
I knew it was a big deal for fans of the multi-award winning singer but as someone who loves the book, it was irritating to think that such a role was being given to a relative novice.
Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel is a psychologically dense exploration of depression, identity, and societal pressure and the central role is the kind of part that can define an actor’s career, or expose their limitations, very quickly.
Even the 1979 adaption of the novel was a disaster for its star, Marilyn Hassett, who had previously won a Golden Globe but who was savaged for her performance as Esther Greenwood, and her career never recovered.
So it is a role even established actors should think twice before taking – and Billie Eilish is about as far from that as you can get.
Of course, its not that Eilish lacks talent, but because this news taps into one of Hollywood’s most persistently annoying habits: the stunt-casting of pop stars in serious acting roles.
It’s a phenomenon that happens so often now it barely registers as unusual, and the sequence is almost always the same: A singer releases a hugely successful album (or several), builds a devoted global fanbase, and before long they’re appearing in prestige dramas, arthouse projects or glossy blockbusters.
Think Harry Styles in Don’t Worry Darling, Dua Lipa in Argylle, or even ASAP Rocky working with Spike Lee in Highest 2 Lowest.
And then, very often, those films flop – despite the star power.
Argylle in particular is thought to have lost hundreds of millions of pounds.
Despite Eilish’s talents, The Bell Jar is treading a well worn path – one that could lead it to disaster.
Acting is relational, with every performance existing in concert with the others around it, so when one actor feels out of place, the entire scene begins to wobble.
None of this is meant as a cruel dismissal of musicians who try their hand at acting. Performing music on stage and performing in an acting role on screen do share some DNA – both require presence, emotional expression and the ability to hold an audience’s attention – but they remain very different crafts.
Acting, in particular, is technical, collaborative and often deliberately invisible, which is why the best performances rarely feel like performances at all.
And most pop stars, understandably, haven’t spent years learning how to do it. They also, by contrast, spend their careers being as visible and showy as possible.
Recently, Harry Styles himself has been refreshingly candid about the differences between acting and singing. Promoting Don’t Worry Darling at the Venice Film Festival, he admitted: ‘I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing’ when it comes to acting, describing music and film as ‘the opposite in a lot of ways.’
It soon became clear how true that admission was.
When Styles appeared opposite Florence Pugh (by then already Oscar nominated) in Olivia Wilde’s psychological thriller, the mismatch between them quickly became a talking point.
Critics widely praised Pugh’s performance while reacting to the former One Direction star with anything from pity to bewilderment.
Do you agree with casting musicians in major acting roles without prior experience?
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Yes, they bring a new perspective to the role.
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No, these roles should go to trained actors.
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It depends on the musician and their talent.
Interestingly, it seemed like the problem wasn’t simply that he was bad; it was that the gap between him and the rest of the cast felt impossible to ignore.
That’s the real danger of stunt casting: A weak performance doesn’t quietly disappear into the background when it’s given by the most famous person on screen. Instead, it tends to pull the entire film slightly off balance and pull focus away from the narrative.
With Billie Eilish, her performance will be so central that the whole film will live and die by it.
Part of the explanation for stunt casting like this is brutally simple: marketing. Casting a globally famous pop star guarantees attention.
Their fanbase will show up out of curiosity, if nothing else, while their name generates headlines, social media buzz and a marketing hook that studios can build entire campaigns around.
But there’s also a broader cultural shift at play: the rise of the celebrity ‘multi-hyphenate’.
In the age of the attention economy, being good at one thing no longer seems sufficient. Artists are expected to exist everywhere at once in order to remain culturally relevant.
They release albums, star in films, collaborate with fashion brands, host podcasts and maintain a constant online presence, all in the hope of keeping audiences – whose attention spans are only growing shorter – engaged between projects.
If you’re a pop star, the logic goes, you might as well try everything else.
In theory, the rise of the multi-hyphenate artists sounds like creative freedom. In practice, it often produces work that feels strangely hollow; less like a genuine artistic impulse and more like an exercise in brand expansion.
Of course, there are exceptions. Lady Gaga is the obvious one, and the example everyone reaches for whenever the pop-star-turned-actor pipeline comes under criticism.
Her performance in A Star Is Born earned her an Oscar nomination and established her as a credible screen presence, but Gaga’s success actually proves the rule rather than breaking it. She approached acting with the seriousness of someone learning a new discipline, not simply adding another line to her résumé, and treated the craft with visible commitment.
Even then, genuine crossover success remains rare. The industry tends to take the wrong lesson from examples like Gaga. Instead of recognising how unusual that success is, studios treat it as proof the formula works. Cast another pop star. Chase another crossover hit. Maybe lightning will strike twice.
More often, it doesn’t.
Which brings us back to The Bell Jar, and why the instinct to stunt-cast it feels particularly abominable in this instance.
There are, after all, thousands of trained actors who would give anything for a role like that — people who have spent years studying, auditioning, and scraping by on small theatre parts in the hope of eventually landing exactly this kind of project.
When studios bypass them in favour of a globally famous singer with no major acting résumé, aside from a mostly-forgotten role in TV series Swarm, it inevitably raises the question of what the industry values most. And the answer, increasingly, seems to be attention.
None of this means musicians should never act. Some will discover a genuine aptitude for it, just as some actors turn out to be brilliant directors or writers. Creative careers are rarely neat or predictable.
But Hollywood’s current approach treats acting less like a craft and more like another extension of celebrity branding, and as more and more popstars and influencers start appearing on screen, there are fewer and fewer parts for real actors.
The reality is that most people – even extremely talented people – are very, very good at one thing only. And they should start sticking to it.
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