While some may think that members of famous rock bands like Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, and Genesis get all the fame and attention they could ever want from their musical endeavors, these musicians found performative energy to spare when they made these fan-favorite movie cameos.
At one point during their careers, classic rockers from all three groups took a break from the stage to make a cameo appearance in a film, much to fans’ delight.
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Keep reading to see what roles Mick Fleetwood, Paul McCartney, and Phil Collins played.
Mick Fleetwood in ‘The Running Man’
In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in The Running Man, a dystopian film about prisoners competing in a deadly game show. Mick Fleetwood, the famed drummer of Fleetwood Mac, popped up for a cameo in the movie.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2008, Fleetwood recalled getting to know Schwarzenegger on the set of the film, in which he played Mic, the leader of the underground resistance movement.
“His main thing in life is going from one prank to the next,” Fleetwood revealed. “It could be a car not starting, or maybe a camera wouldn’t work, and the cameraman wouldn’t know that some vital part had been taken out. We’d watch the cameraman die a thousand deaths, everyone looking at him, like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ when we all knew Arnie had taken the batteries out.”
“Other times it would be something horribly involved; he’d work on an elaborate prank for three weeks. And I’d get involved in some of them. I’d go into his trailer on the set like it was a military operation, and then you’d be sworn to secrecy as the pranks unfolded,” he continued. “Mostly it was all in good humor, but a couple of things would make you go ‘Whoa.’”
Paul McCartney in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
In the 2017 flick Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, former Beatle Paul McCartney plays Uncle Jack, a pirate relative of Johnny Depp’s Capt. Jack Sparrow.
According to Billboard, the DVD of the movie included a behind-the-scenes segment in which both McCartney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer spoke about how he came to make a cameo in the movie.
“Paul McCartney is an icon. He’s one of the greatest musicians and performers alive,” Bruckheimer said. “And we’re very fortunate that he’s friends with Johnny. Johnny has done favors for him, and he’s returned a favor by being in this movie.”
“I’ve known Johnny a while. I’ve always admired him as Jack Sparrow,” McCartney added. “And he said, ‘You know, I’d love you to be in the next one.’ What, me, a pirate? And he says, ‘Yeah, you can do it and have a lot of fun.’ So he wrote me in.”
Phil Collins in Hook
Closing out our list of rock ‘n’ roll movie cameos is Phil Collins. In between working on his solo material and playing with Genesis, Collins found time to appear in Hook. Collins played the bumbling Inspector Good in Steven Spielberg’s 1991 telling of Peter Pan’s (Robin Williams) adult life.
In a 2016 interview with The Wrap, screenwriter Jim Hart revealed that Collins “was desperate” to be in the flick. As such, Hart said he “wrote the inspector scene and expanded it quite a bit.”
When Collins eventually made it on set, it was to the delight of Dante Basco, who was 15 when he played the leader of the Lost Boys in the movie.
“I went to set to go see him because, of course, this is 91, and Phil Collins is one of the biggest singers in the world at the time,” Basco told Screen Rant in 2021. “He was a very lovely guy.”
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