David Bowie

A Strange Body in Front of the Camera

Nicolas Roeg watched the documentary Cracked Actor on British television and ruled out every professional actor on his list. He was looking for a guy capable of seeming alien without latex prosthetics or laboratory optical effects. David Jones had been consuming cocaine at destructive levels for months and weighed just over eighty-eight pounds.

In 1976, he arrived on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth without ever having set foot in an acting school. But he brought with him the mime lessons of Lindsay Kemp and a physical stiffness that unsettled the camera crew.

Nobody had to teach him how to look out of place.

Roeg's production cost barely $1.5 million and worked thanks to that lost stare Bowie didn't even pretend to have. British film critics didn't know where to place it. He wasn't a singer doing a luxury cameo or an amateur trying his luck, but a strange body that absorbed the frame.

Two years later, David Hemmings convinced him to shoot Just a Gigolo in West Berlin alongside Kim Novak and Marlene Dietrich. The film was a massive financial disaster that the press mercilessly savaged. Bowie admitted years later that he took the role only to meet Dietrich and described the movie as his thirty-two Elvis films rolled into one.

The Broadway Comedy of Failure and Mime

Far from retreating to the recording studio, the musician tried New York theater in 1980. He played Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man on Broadway for one hundred and fifty-seven consecutive performances. He performed bare-chested and without a trace of makeup, distorting his posture and diction through absolute muscle control.

In 1983, Nagisa Oshima took him to the jungles of Java to shoot Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. He shared the screen with Takeshi Kitano and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto in a suffocating shoot marked by heat and clashing egos.

Three years later came Jim Henson's dark fantasy Labyrinth. He played Jareth, the Goblin King, surrounded by intricate puppets and sets designed by Brian Froud.

And the American box office turned its back on him.

The film barely grossed twelve million dollars against a budget of twenty-five on its theatrical release. That commercial stumble plunged director Henson into a deep technical depression, and Bowie took years to regain interest in the major Hollywood studios.

Tesla's Lightning in Three Days of Filming

During the nineties, he preferred minimal yet precise appearances. Martin Scorsese gave him the role of Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, and David Lynch dressed him in a light linen suit to play agent Phillip Jeffries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1992.

In 2006, Christopher Nolan was looking for someone to bring inventor Nikola Tesla to life in The Prestige. Bowie turned down the offer in a first phone call without reading the script. So Nolan flew to London in person to explain to him face to face why no other actor on the planet could deliver those lines about electricity and obsession.

He accepted the role on one condition: to shoot all his scenes in compressed workdays to avoid the press. Nolan filmed Tesla's laboratory scenes in an abandoned hangar in Los Angeles in exactly three production days, closing the musician's film career with a supporting role that barely takes up seven minutes of screen time and cost $2 million in practical effects.