Beyonce Once Said She Doesn't Have to Sing in Every Movie She Makes

Celebrity / Movies / Music

Beyoncé's first movies naturally involved music. As she built her acting career she realized it was okay if she sang in each one, but she was open to purely dramatic roles.

Published on March 10, 2021

Most of Beyoncé’s movies feature at least one song from the singer. It makes sense. If you hire Beyoncé, you want the total package. So even Obsessed and The Pink Panther have a Beyoncé song, then there are the musicals Dreamgirls and The Lion King. Even Austin Powers in Goldmember has two, but the singer said at the time she didn’t have to sing in every movie. 

In ‘Austin Powers,’ Beyoncé had to sing

Austin Powers in Goldmember was Beyoncé’s first movie after her success in Destiny’s Child. As ’70s spy Foxxy Cleopatra, she sings “Hey Goldmember” and “Work It Out.”

“I think they had me in mind, was told they had me in mind for Foxxy,” she said at the Austin Powers press junket. “When they first approached me, it was in the script. I think that’s why they wanted a singer. Maybe they didn’t, I don’t know, but I’m happy. I was really more comfortable, because my first scene was doing the singing.”

Beyoncé was afraid of being typecast until she remembered her heroes

After Austin Powers, she starred in the gospel comedy The Fighting Temptations. She was concerned that all Beyoncé movies would have to be musicals, until she remembered some other great actor/singers who made it work.

“At first I didn’t want to do Fighting Temptations because I was a singer,” she said. “And I said, ‘People are gonna think every movie I have to be a singer.’ But then I said, ‘Well, Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross always sang, and that’s not bad. It was hot. So why not?’”

She would do movies where she doesn’t sing

Beyoncé would keep finding roles that asked her to sing, like Dreamgirls or playing Etta James in Cadillac Records and covering some of her classics. Obsessed was purely a dramatic part, but she still sang a song for the film.

“If I see a role that doesn’t have singing in it, I’m not going to say I don’t want to do it,” she said. “But if it’s a good role and it has it in it, why not?”

Beyoncé had to learn to sing in movies

Austin Powers taught Beyoncé that movies were a different process than recording and music videos. When she sang “Hey Goldmember,” she had to be Foxxy Cleopatra in the world of Austin Powers, not her music videos.

“It was very similar, except I couldn’t look into the camera,” she said. “That was the hardest thing. And that was the first day of my shooting, so I really wasn’t used to that. So I was performing and like, ‘Don’t look in the Camera!’”

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