Mick Jagger

In May 1968, Mick Jagger moved into a Notting Hill mansion to shoot a psychedelic nightmare with Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. Warner Bros. executives nearly threw up during the internal test screening. The film sat on a shelf for two years because nobody knew what on earth to do with such a display of sex, drugs and aristocratic decadence.

Performance hit theaters in 1970 and set the rules of the game. Jagger was not playing a typical rock singer. He played himself, stripped of the friendly charm, transformed into a dangerous, androgynous recluse who swapped identities with a fugitive thug.

That film cost Keith Richards his marriage. In return, it gave Jagger a respected place in British cult cinema.

The Actor Herzog Lost in the Jungle

He could have been a great dramatic character actor. In 1981 Werner Herzog took him to the Peruvian jungle to shoot Fitzcarraldo alongside Jason Robards. Robards came down with a severe case of dysentery, the shoot was suspended for months, and Jagger had to catch a plane to his band's American tour.

Herzog cut the character of the assistant Wilbur rather than look for a mediocre replacement. The discarded reels of his work ended up in a Munich archive. In the documentary Burden of Dreams, footage from that shoot still shows Jagger displaying a disturbing magnetism that Hollywood never knew how to use.

And the commercial detour proved deadly.

Because the American film industry only offered him roles that worked as caricatures of his public image. In 1992 he agreed to don a leather suit of armor for Freejack, a futuristic action movie that grossed barely 17 million dollars against an inflated budget. Critics tore his work apart. Jagger realized that in front of the camera he would always be a hostage to his musical fame.

Even so, he had some notable moments. In 1997 he delivered a memorable turn in a brief cross-dressing role in Sean Mathias's Bent, and in 2001 he played Luther Fox in The Man from Elysian Fields, a modest production where he brought exactly the coolness the script demanded.

The Quiet Business of Jagged Films

In the mid-nineties he founded his own production company with Victoria Pearman. Jagged Films was born with a pragmatic goal that steered clear of the artistic fantasies common among music stars. Jagger wanted absolute control over intellectual property and international distribution contracts.

His first serious project was Enigma in 2001, a spy thriller about the codebreakers of Bletchley Park directed by Michael Apted. Financing was a constant headache. Jagger put up his own money and lent an authentic Enigma machine from his personal collection so the art department would not fake the details of the cipher machine.

Nobody at the box office went wild over the film.

But the project recouped its investment in the European market and laid the foundation for his working method. Jagger would show up at the editing rooms in the morning, go over contracts line by line, and discuss budgets with accountants without raising his voice. Zero hysteria in the offices.

In 2014 he brought out Get on Up, the biopic about James Brown starring Chadwick Boseman. Jagger handled the purchase of the music rights from the singer's heirs after months of court battles. The film cost 30 million dollars and barely recouped its money at the box office, though critics praised the faithfulness of its sound without reservation.

Runaway budgets and a homemade tape

Two years later he teamed up with Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter to produce Vinyl for HBO. The series aimed to portray the New York record industry of 1973 with gritty, frenetic realism.

The pilot episode directed by Scorsese cost 30 million dollars. That outrageous figure strangled the project from its very first airing. Ratings fell by half in the third week, and executives canceled the second season after having announced its renewal.

It was his most bitter financial blow.

In 2019 he accepted a role in Giuseppe Capotondi's The Burnt Orange Heresy, playing a manipulative art collector at a villa on Lake Como. In 2022 he composed the theme song for the spy series Slow Horses for Apple TV+. He wrote the melody with Daniel Pemberton over video calls and recorded the vocal tracks in his own home studio with a Shure SM7B microphone in a single afternoon of work.