Charli XCX Will Cameo in Martin Scorsese’s ‘What Happens at Night’

Charli XCX has spent the past year building a film career in the least obvious way available to a pop star: by writing music for other people’s movies. Now she will appear in one. Variety reports that she has a cameo in Martin Scorsese’s next project, What Happens at Night, a psychological thriller starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as a married couple who travel to a small European town to adopt a baby. The film is a co-production between Apple and StudioCanal and has no release date.

The pairing is not as random as it reads. When Charli revealed the cover for Music, Fashion, Film, she put Scorsese on it alongside John Cale and Marc Jacobs, one figure for each discipline in the title. Whether or not that was a pitch, it worked.

Her screen work has been accumulating alongside the records. Last year she appeared in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, Pete Ohs’ Erupja and Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary The Moment, which documented the BRAT era from the inside. She wrote the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, including “House,” her first collaboration with Cale, and co-wrote music for A24’s Mother Mary.

There is an irony worth noting. On the Music, Fashion, Film track “Camera,” Charli asked whether it is stupid to try to be a girl on screen as she turns thirty-four. The answer, on the evidence, is no. The cameo is small, but the direction of travel is not.