The Marvel Cinematic Universe has given us gods, geniuses, billionaires, and at least one talking tree.
But even stranger than a raccoon with a machine gun is the fact that several Marvel movie stars once chased
music careers that feel like they were written during a particularly chaotic post-credits scene.
We’re not talking about the occasional movie soundtrack ballad or late-night talk show duet. These are
full-on albums, girl groups, punk-funk bands, and even a failed Christmas single that sounds like it escaped
from a haunted jukebox. If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite Marvel actors were doing before (or in
between) saving the universe, their weird music careers are a wild ride.
Let’s press play on five of the weirdest music side quests Marvel movie stars have ever taken and what
they say about fame, reinvention, and the strange overlap between comic-book movies and pop culture.
5. Brie Larson’s Teen Pop-Rock Era No One Talks About
Long before she was Captain Marvel punching spaceships out of the sky, Brie Larson was a
teen pop hopeful with a record deal, a mall tour, and a song about escaping gym class. Yes, really.
From Disney Channel Kid to Pop Singer
In the mid-2000s, Larson released her debut (and so far only) album, Finally Out of P.E.,
through Casablanca Records. The album leaned into pop-rock with lyrics about school, crushes, and the everyday
drama of being a teenager. The title track is literally about the joy of being exempt from gym class because
she got a record deal an energy that’s extremely “I swear this counts as P.E., Mr. Thompson.”
She promoted the album with performances on teen-oriented tours and even opened for Jesse McCartney on his
Beautiful Soul tour. For a brief moment in the mid-2000s, Captain Marvel was out there singing
pop songs to screaming teens in American malls instead of flying Flerkens through space.
When the Album Flops but Becomes a Cult Relic
Despite the label push, Finally Out of P.E. sold only a few thousand copies before quietly disappearing
from the mainstream. Years later, it turned into a kind of internet curiosity: fans stumble on old music videos,
realize that’s Brie Larson in a pink skirt rocking out about homework, and promptly fall down a YouTube rabbit hole.
Larson herself has joked that the pop-star life wasn’t for her the industry wanted glossy pop glamour, while she
wanted sneakers and a guitar. In hindsight, the whole thing feels like an alternate universe where Brie became
a full-time pop girl instead of an Oscar-winning actress and superhero. Weird? Absolutely. But also kind of charming.
4. Jeremy Renner’s Reluctant Rock-Star Brand Extension
Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye is the guy in the Avengers who brings a bow to a cosmic laser fight. Jeremy Renner the
musician, on the other hand, brings a gravelly voice, dramatic piano chords, and a surprising number of car
commercials.
The Actor Who Made His Fans Listen to Him Sing
Renner has quietly sung in films for years, but his music career went into overdrive when he leaned into rock-inspired
anthems and emotional ballads. He released tracks like “Main Attraction” and songs on his EP
The Medicine, a collection of earnest, heart-on-sleeve rock tunes that sound like
they were engineered for movie trailers and dramatic driving scenes.
The weirdness hit maximum level when he briefly launched an official Jeremy Renner app that, infamously,
auto-played his cover of “House of the Rising Sun” whenever fans opened it. Imagine just trying to check a
notification and suddenly being ambushed by Hawkeye belting classic rock at you. It’s a very specific kind of
jump scare.
When Your Music Career Gets Sponsored by a Jeep
Renner’s songs also found a home in a Jeep ad campaign, where he starred as both driver and soundtrack. It’s one
of the most on-brand crossovers of all time: a rugged action star crooning while dramatically driving through
the desert. You half expect an Ultron drone to fly by.
The result is a music career that lives in a strange space between genuine passion project and high-gloss brand
synergy. Renner clearly loves making music but the way it’s been packaged makes it feel like the official
audio companion to “middle-aged man buying his second SUV.” It’s sincere, a bit intense, and definitely weird.
3. Anthony Hopkins and the Haunting Pop Single “Distant Star”
Sir Anthony Hopkins is part of the Marvel world as Odin, father of Thor and champion nap-taker on Asgardian thrones.
Most people know him as a legendary actor. Fewer know that, in the 1980s, he decided to take a shot at pop stardom.
The Classical Composer Who Dropped a Pop Record
Hopkins has written classical music for much of his life, eventually releasing orchestral compositions performed by
full symphonies. That part makes sense: dignified actor, sweeping classical scores, serious album covers.
The strange twist came in 1986, when he released a vinyl single called “Distant Star”. The track
mixes spoken-word drama with a pop arrangement, like someone put the spooky monologue from an ’80s horror movie
over a sentimental radio ballad. It was pitched as a potential Christmas hit in the UK, which is exactly the
kind of chaotic energy you’d expect from a world where Odin is also trying to chart next to Wham!.
A Curio Hopkins Would Rather You Didn’t Bring Up
“Distant Star” never truly took off, but it lives on in the depths of record collectors’ boxes and on the internet,
where curious fans occasionally rediscover it and wonder what exactly they just listened to. Hopkins has reportedly
brushed it off as a novelty project that got more attention than it deserved.
In the grand scheme of weird Marvel music careers, this one ranks high: an Oscar-winning actor and future MCU god
attempting to conquer the pop charts with a dramatic spoken-word single. Somewhere in the multiverse, “Distant Star”
actually did become a Christmas number one, and that universe is probably a lot stranger than ours.
2. Peter Dinklage’s Punk-Funk-Rap Battle Scar
Peter Dinklage is best known to genre fans as Tyrion Lannister and, in the Marvel universe, as Eitri, the giant
dwarf who helps craft Thor’s new weapon in Avengers: Infinity War. Before all that, he was screaming his
lungs out in a New York club with a band that sounded like the Beastie Boys got lost in a funk rehearsal.
Whizzy: The Punk-Funk-Rap Band at CBGB
In the 1990s, Dinklage fronted a band called Whizzy, which he has described as a
“punk-funk-rap” group. They played in New York City, including the legendary venue CBGB the kind of place where
it was practically a requirement to risk at least minor injury onstage.
During one chaotic show, Dinklage was reportedly kneed in the temple while bouncing around the stage. He kept
performing even as blood ran down his face, using a bar napkin to dab at the wound like it was just another
Tuesday. The incident left a scar running from his neck up to his eyebrow, a literal rock-and-roll battle mark
he still carries.
From Dive Bars to Dwarven King
It’s bizarre and oddly fitting that the man who once bled his way through a punk-funk set at CBGB would later
play a gruff, wounded master craftsman in the MCU. Whizzy never became a mainstream success, and there are few
recordings, which only adds to the legend: it’s like finding out your favorite actor had a secret life as the
singer of a band that mostly exists now as rumors, scars, and grainy photos.
As weird Marvel music careers go, Dinklage’s is the most “I saw them before they were famous” story of the bunch.
1. Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits Covers and Pop Girl Group Drama
Natasha Romanoff might be an elite assassin, but Scarlett Johansson the musician has made some truly unexpected
choices including a Tom Waits cover album and a short-lived girl group that got hit with a cease-and-desist
letter over its name.
Covering Tom Waits Like an Art-House Pop Experiment
In 2008, the same year Marvel was kicking off its modern cinematic run with Iron Man, Johansson released
her debut album, Anywhere I Lay My Head. Instead of a safe, radio-friendly pop record,
she dropped a collection of mostly Tom Waits covers produced by Dave Sitek, with guest vocals from David Bowie.
The album layers hazy production, distorted vocals, and indie-rock textures. Critics were divided: some praised
the boldness and atmosphere; others wondered why a Hollywood star just made a murky avant-pop tribute to one of
the most distinctive gravel-voiced songwriters alive. Commercially, it performed modestly, but it firmly established
Johansson as someone who was not interested in doing the obvious thing.
The Singles: A Girl Group with a Legal Plot Twist
A few years later, Johansson doubled down on her music side quests by forming a girl group called
The Singles with Este Haim and several other musicians. They released a bright, candy-coated
pop track called “Candy,” inspired by bands like The Go-Go’s ultra-pop, slightly tongue-in-cheek, and very
aware of its own bubblegum vibe.
Then reality intervened: another band, also called The Singles and already active for years, hit them with a
cease-and-desist for using the same name. Rather than launching a long legal battle, Johansson’s project
essentially dissolved, turning The Singles into another strange footnote in the Marvel-adjacent music multiverse.
Between the Tom Waits covers, Bowie collaborations, and a girl group derailed by trademark law, Johansson might
have the single weirdest music résumé of any Avenger and that’s saying something.
What These Weird Music Careers Say About Marvel Stars
Taken together, these five music careers paint a picture of Marvel stars as restless creative experimenters.
Before they were locked into multi-film superhero contracts, many of them tried on other forms of expression:
- Brie Larson tested the waters as a teen pop-rocker, complete with mall tours and very mid-2000s fashion.
- Jeremy Renner leaned into an earnest, radio-ready rock persona that moonlights as commercial soundtrack fuel.
- Anthony Hopkins aimed for the pop charts with a theatrical single that now lives as cult ephemera.
- Peter Dinklage threw himself into a scrappy punk-funk band and walked away with a permanent scar.
- Scarlett Johansson made art-pop covers and then tried to build a girl group, only to be stopped by trademark law.
None of these projects were straightforward Hollywood cash-ins. They’re too odd, too specific, and in some cases,
too commercially doomed for that. Instead, they feel like genuine side quests the kind of creative experiments
people make when they’re chasing an impulse rather than a guaranteed hit.
For fans, discovering these music careers is like finding a secret post-credits scene in real life. You think you
know these actors as superheroes, kings, spies, or cosmic beings and then you catch a grainy video of them in
a band, and the whole mental image shifts just a little.
Conclusion: The Marvel Music Multiverse Is Real
The Marvel universe is built on the idea of multiverses endless alternate realities where familiar characters
make very different choices. In one, Tony Stark never escapes that cave. In another, Brie Larson’s album goes
platinum and she spends the 2010s headlining festivals instead of blasting aliens.
The truth we live in is stranger in its own small way. These weird music careers didn’t conquer the charts, but
they left behind stories, scars, videos, and records that fans can still dig up. They remind us that even the
biggest stars went through awkward experiments, ambitious side projects, and occasionally disastrous ideas on
their way to superhero status.
So the next time you rewatch an Avengers movie, remember: somewhere out there, a dusty CD, vinyl single, or
half-forgotten streaming track is proof that your favorite Marvel hero once had a completely different plan
for their life and it probably involved a microphone.
Behind the Scenes: Experiencing the Weird Music Careers of Marvel Stars
Part of the fun of these bizarre music side quests is how you usually discover them: not through a huge marketing
push, but through some late-night internet spiral. One minute you’re searching for a clip from
Avengers: Endgame, the next you’ve somehow landed on a 2005 music video where Brie Larson is singing
about getting out of P.E. while playing guitar in a high school hallway.
Hearing these songs for the first time is oddly disorienting. Your brain keeps trying to reconcile “Academy Award
winner and Marvel superhero” with “teen pop singer in layered tank tops and chunky belts.” The production, the
styling, the melodies everything screams mid-2000s radio, and yet the face is unmistakably the same one that
later pilots spaceships for the Avengers. It feels like watching a prequel from a completely different genre.
Jeremy Renner’s music can have a similar effect, but in a different direction. If you hit play on one of his
rock tracks without context, it just sounds like serious, dramatic, modern rock the kind of song you’d hear in
the trailer for a gritty streaming drama. Then you remember, “Oh right, this is Hawkeye. Hawkeye is singing about
pain, redemption, and driving through a storm in slow motion.” Suddenly, Jeep commercials and moody lyric videos
start to feel like unofficial MCU spin-offs.
The experience gets even stranger when you dive into Anthony Hopkins’s “Distant Star.” It doesn’t sound like a
typical novelty record; it feels more like a message from a parallel ’80s where spoken-word ballads were huge.
Listening to Odin deliver a melodramatic pop monologue is almost surreal like having your stern space-dad suddenly
break into an experimental radio single. It’s not that the song is unlistenable; it’s that your brain keeps shouting,
“Why does this exist, and why do I kind of want to play it again?”
Peter Dinklage’s Whizzy era, meanwhile, feels like its own urban legend. There aren’t many clean recordings, which
means fans are mostly piecing it together through interviews, scraps of audio, and photographs. The story of him
getting kneed in the head at CBGB and finishing the show while bleeding feels like something a screenwriter would
invent as a metaphor except it really happened. When you watch him later as Eitri forging a weapon for Thor, it’s
impossible not to see a little of that punk-show stubbornness in the performance.
Scarlett Johansson’s music projects are probably the ones most likely to trip you up critically. If you go into
Anywhere I Lay My Head expecting a straightforward pop album, you might be confused it’s dense, dreamy,
and more art-house than chart-friendly. But if you listen to it like an indie experiment made by someone who wasn’t
trying to please everyone, it starts to make sense. Then you queue up “Candy” by The Singles and suddenly you’re in
a different universe again: bright, bouncy girl-group pop with a legal subplot waiting in the wings.
Collectively, experiencing these projects feels like exploring bonus levels in a video game. None of them are
necessary to enjoy the Marvel movies, but once you know they’re out there, they become part of the larger mythology.
Fans share clips, swap stories, and argue over which project is secretly good versus which one is “so bad it loops
back around to being iconic.” In an era where celebrity images are carefully managed, these flawed, earnest,
occasionally chaotic music ventures are oddly refreshing proof that even superheroes go through weird phases and
leave them online for the rest of us to discover.