Yahoo Lifestyle Famous Actors Who Had Totally Wild And Unexpected Music Careers Before Hitting It Big Onscreen
1.This factoid about Maya Rudolph — the comedy star from Bridesmaids, Saturday Night Live, and The Good Place — is bound to blow the minds of Gen X'ers and '90s music fans.
First, a little background: You probably recognize the band below — it's Weezer, specifically the lineup from their 1994 debut album, which featured hits like "Buddy Holly" and "Undone (The Sweater Song)."
Before recording Weezer's second album, bassist Matt Sharp started a side project, a band called The Rentals, which scored a big MTV hit of their own, "Friends of P." That's where Maya Rudolph came in. Right after graduating from college — and before Rudolph had a single acting credit — she joined The Rentals as they toured behind their first album.
"It was such a fun job out of college," Maya told the New Yorker. "I got to live on the road for six months. We opened for Blur and for Alanis Morissette, and we got to spend Thanksgiving with her and play hacky sack with her band and go bowling."
She added: "I got the gig because my girlfriends from high school, Rachel and Petra Haden, were already in a band called That Dog, and they couldn’t go on tour. So Rachel said, 'Call my friend Maya.' I was in a band in college, but it was a hobby."
When the tour ended, Maya joined The Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles, hoping to pursue sketch comedy and Saturday Night Live. A good career move, I say!
2.Here's another wild one — in the late '60s comedy legend Chevy Chase attended Bard College in New York, where he studied English and played drums in a band called The Leather Canary. The exciting part? The other members of the band were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
You know...Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted duo Steely Dan!
“We started Steely Dan, basically,” Chase told Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast back in 2023. “I was [Fagen’s] first drummer and I loved it."
Fagan later weighed in on Chase, saying, “We went to college with Chevy and before we ever thought of the idea of Steely Dan we used to do pickup dates with Chevy on drums. He was a very good drummer.”
That wasn't the end of Chase's music career. He went on to be the drummer for another band, Chamaeleon Church, who were signed by MGM Records and released an album in 1968, but it bombed so badly Chase likely found it...funny.
3.Academy Award-winning actor Brie Larson (Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) also had a surprising — and brief — music career back when her acting career was in its embryonic stages.
Larson began playing guitar at age 11 and soon started writing, recording, and uploading songs to her website. This led to her song "Invisible Girl" (written after she failed to win the role of Wendy in 2003's Peter Pan) getting some airplay on a Los Angeles radio station. Things kept looking up for Larson when the 16-year-old got signed to a major label deal and released her debut album Finally Out of P.E.
Her lead single, "She Said," had a very, very 2005 video (and a literal future movie star front and center), but the album only sold 4,000 or so copies. Yikes!
It may not have been a hit, but look on the bright side — if it were a big smash, she may never have focused on acting!
4.You know Stephen Tobolowsky? The actor who played insurance agent Ned Ryerson in the 1993 classic Groundhog Day with Bill Murray?
Well, before he went on to star in over 200 movies (like Freaky Friday) and on TV shows (like Glee), he grew up in Dallas, where he and some high school buddies had a band called Cast of Thousands. "We were a terrible folk rock band," Tobolowsky told the Lone Star Plate podcast. "We were really bad." Terrible or not, in 1970, they were picked to record two songs on a garage band compilation. To fill out their sound, band member Bobby Forman invited a kid from the neighborhood to play lead guitar — future blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Since Vaughan wasn't even old enough to drive, Tobolowsky protested, "We can play the guitars. We don't need any kid playing our guitar." But Forman insisted, replying, "Shut up! This kid Stevie is so good he's gonna make us sound like we know what we're doing."
As it turns out, these songs were Vaughan's first studio recordings, and his blistering, Eric Clapton-style lead performance was so good that all of the adults in the studio crowded into the control room to watch him play.
"It was the first time we saw genius," Tobolowsky recounted, "and when you see that for real, there's no coming back from it. You realize, one, it exists, and that's good news, and then you realize how far away you are from that, and that is sorta bad news. But it is true that Stevie did make us sound like we knew what we were doing."
Above Tobolowsky shows off a photo from the session.
5.You know actor Jason Schwartzman as a favorite of director Wes Anderson (having appeared in eight of his movies including Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel), but four years before making his professional acting debut, a 14-year-old Schwartzman joined the Los Angeles-based band Phantom Planet as their drummer.
Phantom Planet's 1998 debut album failed to make much of an impression, but right around the time Schwartzman's acting career took off, the band scored a big hit with the song "California," which became the theme song for the TV series The O.C. Schwartzman even co-wrote the tune!
Schwartzman left the group in 2003 when movie stardom called, but he continued to dabble in music, even releasing his own solo albums.
6.Long before Rashida Jones made us laugh on The Office and Parks and Recreation, she dabbled in the late '90s and early '00s as a professional singer.
This probably should come as no shock, considering her dad was 28-time Grammy award-winning record producer Quincy Jones. Still, you might not know she sang on The High & Mighty's 1999 album Home Field Advantage, the Tupac Shakur tribute album The Rose That Grew from Concrete, released in 2000, and, maybe most surprisingly, Maroon 5's debut album, 2002's Songs About Jane.
Speaking about her time singing with Maroon 5 at 2015's New York Comic-Con, she revealed that she'd recently found in her belongings a Maroon 5 demo tape from when the band was still called Kara’s Flowers.
“I was like, ‘This has got to be worth something. If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to sell it on eBay.'”
7.These days, Peter Dinklage is known as the star of Game of Thrones and Elf, but back in the '90s, the twentysomething future Emmy award winner was the frontman of a punk band called Whizzy.
Whizzy released a four-song demo tape in 1995 and played in New York clubs like the famous CBGB.
Dinklage told the New Yorker, "We had a following, but our following was, like, progressive rock. It was all guys. For some reason, just dudes came to our shows. I felt a little bit, like, what’s the point of being in a rock band if there’s no ladies?"
The band eventually broke up, which probably was a good thing for Dinklage's acting career, especially considering the following anecdote he told Playboy:
"I have a pretty big scar that runs from my neck to my eyebrow...We played a show at CBGB, and I was jumping around onstage and got accidentally kneed in the temple. I was like Sid Vicious, just bleeding all over the stage. Blood was going everywhere. I just grabbed a dirty bar napkin and dabbed my head and went on with the show. We didn't care much at the time about personal safety. We were smoking and drinking during our shows, and one time my bass player fell off the back of his amp because he passed out. It was one of those bands."
Dinklage hasn't left music behind entirely. You can hear him sing — as Dr. Dillamond — on the Wicked soundtrack.
8.Have we got a photo for you! It's of comedian Ricky Gervais, who you know as the creator and star of the British The Office and controversial host of the Golden Globes.
But before his comedy career took off, Gervais and his friend Bill Macrae formed the new-wave duo Seona Dancing (I promise this is real, LOL). That's young Ricky on the right.
The duo released two singles in 1983. "Bitter Heart" had a video and reached No. 79 on the British charts, while "More to Lose" did even worse, charting at No. 117, but inexplicably became a big hit in the Philippines.
Gervais told People magazine, "We got signed on a demo tape, released two records, and they failed. That was the end of it . . . I was a pop star for a year."
He went on to explain that he decided to learn the guitar after, at age 16, seeing David Bowie perform "Heroes" on television. If you listen to either of Seona Dancing's songs, you'll agree with Gervais's assessment: "I ripped off David Bowie badly."
Gervais didn't totally leave music in the past. In 2016, he released Life on the Road, an album of songs as his The Office character, David Brent.
9.Speaking of The Office stars, Ed Helms fell in love with bluegrass music as a boy and later met some like-minded musicians, Ian Riggs and Jacob Tilove, at Oberlin College. Dubbed The Lonesome Trio, they played on back porches and at basement keg parties, then moved to New York after college and became a fixture in the NYC bluegrass scene.
Of course, Helms was most focused on becoming a comedian/actor, and after hitting it big, he used his star power to help the group record a self-titled debut in 2013. They also performed at the prestigious Bonnaroo festival, and the LA Bluegrass Situation, a festival Helms helped put together.
Reminiscing about the LA Bluegrass Situation on its 10th anniversary, Helms said, "We put a totally magical lineup together. Like I still can’t wrap my head around it. I mean, it was Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch and Steve Martin and Steep Canyon Rangers and Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers and the Infamous Stringdusters… Oh, and of course the Lonesome Trio, my crew."
Way to go Nard Dog!
10.And lastly, Harrison Ford wasn't a musician pre-fame, but he did have a wild connection to music history.
In 1970, Ford was trying to start a career as a carpenter when he got hired for a massive job — building a recording studio for Brazilian bossa nova music legend Sérgio Mendes.
What Mendes didn't know when he hired Ford, though, was that this was the future Indiana Jones's first professional carpentry job!
Ford told Entertainment Tonight in 1982, "The first job I had was a $100,000 recording studio for Sérgio Mendes in his backyard in Encino. A very nice man, Sérgio. And never asked me if I had done it before. So, I never brought it up and it came out very well, thank you. But thanks to books from the Encino Public Library."
Ford may have been flying by the seat of his pants (and frantically reading every carpentry book in the library), but he must've done a good job because Mendes said in 1983, "Well, when I decided to build this studio, a friend of mine told me, well, 'I know a young carpenter. So he came over. Young fellow with a beard and the long hair. And I said, 'OK, let's do the studio.' And his name was Harrison Ford. And the rest, you know, is history. And he is a great carpenter. He did a marvelous job."
So the next time you hear a bossa nova tune, there's a chance it was recorded in a studio made by Harrison Ford!
