David Bowie

In Labyrinth (1986), David Bowie plays Jareth as though being surrounded by puppets were an ordinary condition of royal life. We laughed at his seriousness, because he never treats the creatures as something he has been asked to humour. There is stiffness in the performance, but it gives the Goblin King a useful air of expecting to be obeyed. Jim Henson gets something valuable from that stiffness: Bowie belongs in this peculiar company without needing to seem friendly.

The casting had an earlier, more explicitly otherworldly precedent in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), his first major film role, as the alien visitor Thomas Jerome Newton. Leading parts followed in The Hunger (1983) and Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), but after the mid-1980s his appearances became occasional, often supporting parts or cameos. It is worth keeping that small, unevenly spaced body of work in proportion. We need not turn every appearance into a major performance to recognise how well directors could use his unusual presence.

The songs have a proper place in Henson’s Labyrinth: Bowie wrote them, and they give the film a welcome change of pace. His commitment keeps the musical passages from feeling like interruptions arranged for a famous guest. That matters in a film whose story already wanders and whose tone does not always settle. He cannot solve those problems, and the middle stretch still asks for patience. The puppets remain as important to the pleasure as their king.

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) gives Bowie a supporting part as Tesla. Nolan specifically sought him for the role, another instance of a director finding a use for his unusual presence. It is the stronger film, despite its fussy explanations, but the gripping professional rivalry belongs chiefly to Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. For Bowie, choose Labyrinth, and forgive Henson the time it sometimes takes to get to the next good scene.