Actors who're also musicians - from Johnny Depp to Ryan Gosling

Thornton, who plays The Garage, on Sauchiehall Street, and Sutherland, who's at the Queen's Hall, are just two of the many renowned actors who also enjoy rewarding careers as musicians. Here we look at a few notable examples.

Kiefer Sutherland

Kiefer has often spoken of his love of music. His mother signed him up for classical violin lessons when he was just four years old. At age ten, he switched to the guitar, and never looked back.

24's Kiefer Sutherland is releasing a folk album

In the late Nineties, already an established actor, he fell for country music. “Writing my own songs just seemed like the natural next step, but it took me a long time to get around to it because… well, we all know the stigma that’s attached to an actor who decides to make music", he told Music Radar in January 2022.

"I didn’t want to be ‘that guy’. Even when I started playing gigs, I made sure we were at least 50 miles from LA. I was not looking for attention; I just wanted to hang out with my buddies.”

Music Radar interview with Kiefer Sutherland

It took him several years before he got round to the idea of putting out an album of his own songs. Notes Music Radar: "His 2016 debut album, Down In A Hole, wasn’t a commercial success, but people did like it, and reviews favourably compared it to Springsteen and John Mellencamp. The 2019 follow-up, Reckless & Me, even made the UK Top 10".

Record Collector magazine says of his most recent studio album, Bloor Street: it "feels solid, strong and potentially big. Everything here, from song structure to sonic choices, is very familiar, but Sutherland uses that sometimes gruff, sometimes sweet voice to convey manly emotion, and Springsteen/Petty fans will find its whiskey-soaked Americana hard to resist. It’s not reinventing any wheels, but he’s inside it, not playing a role".

* Queen's Hall, 85-89 Clerk Street, Edinburgh EH8 9JG. Concert is sold out.

Billy Bob Thornton and the Boxmasters

Billy Bob Thornton performs at MadLife Stage & Studios in Woodstock, Georgia, last month (Image: R. Diamond/Getty Images)

Music was the first love of Thornton, who together with the Boxmasters plays The Garage tonight (July 26) and tomorrow night (27).

As Style Weekly put it in 2017, introducing an interview with the actor/musician: "He worked as a roadie for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the mid-’70s, played in a ZZ Top cover band called Tres Hombres, recorded solo albums, and for the past 10 years has been frontman and drummer for the Boxmasters, mixing ’60s hillbilly music with British invasion rock set to the “Sling Blade” writer’s often funny lyrics".

The Boxmasters, which Thornton formed with the Grammy award-winning recording engineer J.D. Andrew, have released 13 albums, the most recent being '69. Thornton has also recorded four solo country music albums.

In a recent interview Thornton said that he and the band "were not living a life of luxury out here. We've got one bus with 10 people on it, and a trailer full of equipment and T-shirts and CDs and records and everything that we haul from gig to gig and set up ourselves.

"... It's what we want to do", he added. "We want to be in the studio recording songs, we want to be on the road playing shows, and, you know, trying to kill ourselves out here playing every single night.

"Because growing up, it's what we imagined we would be doing. We'd see concerts and it would be like, "We want to do that, we want to be playing stages, in front of walls of amplifiers, and drums, and, you know, having roadies moving stuff around." And thankfully, we're still getting to do that, even though we're not kids anymore. Because it's the greatest thing in the world".

The Garage, 490 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3LW. Tickets (£28.50) available on the door both nights.

Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp performs with Hollywood Vampires at Scarborough Open AIr Theatre earlier this month (Image: Dave Lawrence)

Depp the musician has twice played Glasgow in recent times - as a guest of his friend and collaborator, the late Jeff Beck, at the Royal Concert Hall in June of last year (the duo released an album, 18), and earlier this month, at the OVO Hydro, with the band, Hollywood Vampires, which he formed with Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.

Johnny Depp to perform along Jeff Beck in Glasgow tonight

By the time he dropped out of high school in Florida Depp was already a versatile guitarist, and he joined a garage band that played a number of high-profile support slots. In later years he featured on songs by artists as diverse as Oasis and Iggy Pop.

Jamie Foxx

Jamie Foxx (Image: Jonathan Brady/PA Wire)

Foxx, star of such films as Ray (for which he won an Oscar), Collateral, and Django Unchained, is an accomplished singer who had two chart-topping singles in the US Billboard top 100 - Slow Jamz, by Twista alongside Kanye West, and Gold Digger, by Kanye West. He won a Grammy fpr his own single, Blame It, and has also recorded a number of well-received solo albums.

Steven Seagal

Steven Seagal plays the blues (Image: Phil Loach)

The martial arts star got his first guitar at the age of 12, and began steeping himself in the blues.

Steven Seagal and Thunderbox, Renfrew Ferry, Glasgow

He has jammed with such legendary names as BB King, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and has released a couple of albums.

Steve Martin 

Steve Martin has for decades been a renowned banjo player (Image: Getty Images)

Martin, whose many hit films include Father of the Bride, Roxanne, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, has been playing banjo since the age of 17 and went on to become a highly accomplished player of the five-string banjo. He has recorded several albums and has won several awards, including Grammys, for his prowess on the instrument.

Steve Martin and Martin Short: 'Part of our show is old-fashioned but the audience likes it and so do we'

In 2010 he established an annual prize, the Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. which gives a cash sum to “an individual or group for outstanding accomplishment in the field of five-string banjo or bluegrass music".

Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson (Image: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty News)

Johansson, whose films include Lost in Translation, Under the Skin, and Black Widow, showed off her skills, and her taste in music, with the release of an album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, in 2008. It was a record of Tom Waits covers (with one original song), with guests including one David Bowie. Said Pitchfork magazine: "Johansson doesn't take such liberties with lyrics, leaving many of the masculine pronouns unchanged. Still it's startling-- and not unpleasantly so-- to hear a guarded female voice sing words and melodies most commonly associated with Waits' gruff vocals".

Jared Leto

Jared Leto (Image: Agency)

Leto has combined his acting career - Dallas Buyers Club, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Squad, My So-Called Life - with his role in his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, which he formed with his brother. Shannon. Their sixth studio album, It's End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day, is out in September.

Review: 30 Seconds To Mars, SSE Hydro, Glasgow

"Whether actor or musician, Jared Leto's showmanship is undeniable", Herald journalist Jonathan Geddes wrote of the band's concert at the Hydro nearly 10 years ago. "Leto may claim in Search and Destroy that he's "no Jesus" but there were Messianic tendencies in his stage manner, right from an opening that saw him perched in a Christ-like pose overlooking the crowd..."

Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling (Image: Ian West/PA Wire)

Gosling's role as Ken in the newly-released Barbie film has brought him to a new audience, but film fans need little reminder of his acting skills, evident in a wide range of movies, from La-La Land and The Notebook to Drive, The Place Beyond the Pines, The Nice Guys, The Gray Man, Only God Forgives, The Big Short and The Ides of March. He's also a noted singer and musician. He was showing off his talents as a singer even before his days in the Mickey Mouse Club (1993-1994).

In his film Blue Valentine (2010) he sang and played ukelele; in La-Land Land, six years later, he played piano and danced. With his friend Zach Shields he once formed a group, Dead Man's Bones, which put out an album, and toured.

Russell Crowe

Crowe performs with his band Indoor Garden Party during the Firebrand Premiere and Opening Ceremony for the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on June 30 in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic (Image: Gabriel Kuchta/Getty Images)

In addition to being a powerhouse actor - Gladiator (for which he won an Oscar), LA Confidential, The Next Three Days, 3:10 to Yuma, Les Miserables, The Nice Guys - Crowe is a musician, associated with two bands - Thirty-Odd Feet of Grunts, and The Ordinary Fear of God - and latterly with Indoor Garden Party.

In a press statement, Crowe described his Indoor Garden Party shows as 'an event, a band, a happening'. "It's fluid. The personnel changes, but it's always big. It's like a festival where I gather people I admire, musicians and storytellers, and we put on a show", he said.

Jeff Goldblum

Jeff Goldblum (Image: Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM)

The star of such acclaimed films as Jurassic Park, The Fly, Independence Day, and several Wes Anderson movies, is a renowned jazz pianist. Classic FM headlined a story about him by describing him as "actually a world-class jazz pianist".

He once told the New York Times that he started playing the piano while young. “I’m from Pittsburgh and was one of four kids, so our parents got us music lessons, very wisely and nicely and life-changing-ly. I had a facility for it. But I didn’t yet know the joys of discipline”. He has released a number of albums and has played high-profile venues. He even featured on the West Holts stage at Glastonbury in 2019.