Cyndi Lauper has commanded every artistic enterprise she’s taken on. When her debut solo album She’s So Unusual was released in 1983, her powerhouse vocals and ska-influenced new wave singles rocketed up the charts, and her crack comic timing and vibrant wardrobe and makeup found a natural home on MTV. Her storyline as a sidekick to wrestler Wendi Richter in the WWE Brawl to End It All storyline brought wrestling to an unexpected new audience. In more recent years, Lauper has turned her magnetic stage presence and melodic sensibility to Broadway as an actress and composer; her score for the musical Kinky Boots won a Tony in 2013.
2025 finds Lauper in a more valedictory state of mind. After completing what she’s described as a farewell tour, she will join this year’s class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While her willingness to try different media has played a role in her career-long ubiquity, she hasn’t gotten as much attention for her forays into acting in feature films.
By 1987, Lauper was no stranger to movies. She had a cameo as herself in the 1985 sleeper hit The Goonies and appeared in a two-part music video to promote it. While she spent her down time reading scripts for a starring role, nothing jumped out at her. “I’ve wanted to do a movie for a long time, but I didn’t want to do a typical airhead version of what Hollywood thinks a woman is—and I didn’t want to do an ultra-serious La Femme! film either,” she told the LA Times in 1987.
After wrapping up the True Colors world tour, Lauper took on the role of psychic medium Sylvia Pickel in the comedy Vibes. The film follows Sylvia and psychometrist Nick Deezy (Jeff Goldblum), who are hired by Harry Buscafusco (Peter Falk) to find his missing son who’s run away to South America. When the two psychics land in Ecuador, however, they learn they’ve actually been hired to find a lost city of gold in the mountains.
Vibes seemed like it could be a good first starring role for Lauper. Sylvia shares Lauper’s exuberant personality and over-the-top fashion sense, and her unlucky love life could have come out of the lyrics for one of Lauper’s songs. The cast of character actors (including Van Dyke Parks in a cameo role) are on a similar wavelength to the singer-turned-actress, and the quirky plot and broad comedy could have matched the outlandish scenarios of Lauper’s videos.
I’d gone into Vibes expecting an undiscovered 1980s comedy classic, but it didn’t deliver. The screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel frequently undermines the characters for plot twists, and the laggy editing deflates the comic timing in what should have been the funnier moments of the film. Lauper stomps through her scenes with balled-up fists and a hunched-over posture, shouting her dialogue in her thick Queens accent and blinking at her costars as she waits for her punchlines to land.
Vibes was a critical and commercial failure. Released less than a year before Lauper’s troubled third album, A Night to Remember, the film also represented the end of her imperial era. Throughout the 1990s, Lauper showed a willingness to experiment with what worked for her, and her follow-up to Vibes, Life with Mikey, reflected her ability to find projects that played to her strengths.
Like Vibes, Life with Mikey had a throwback story, but where Vibes tried and failed to conjure the best of the screwball comedy era, Life with Mikey brought the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland backstage comedies to a 1990s audience. Talent agent Michael Chapman (Michael J. Fox) is still living off his glory days as a child actor on the sitcom Life with Mikey. As the biggest star on his roster (David Krumholz) threatens to leave the agency, Michael discovers an up-and-coming talent (Christina Vidal) when she attempts to pickpocket him on the subway, and lands her a star-making role in a line of commercials.
Lauper’s role as Geena Briganti shared some similarities with Sylvia from Vibes. The neon colors of her vintage wardrobe have been muted a bit and she speaks at a lower volume, but she’s able to hold her own in a cast of hey-it’s-that-guys. Her calmer presence balances Michael J. Fox’s nervous energy in their scenes together, and her connection with then-newcomer Vidal grounds the improbable closing scenes in emotional realism. Even her physicality has improved; watch her smirk at Fox as she plays the piano with her elbows in a disastrous audition scene.
Unlike Vibes, Life with Mikey was a modest box office success and found a wider audience on basic cable. Lauper kept up her acting chops in the 1990s with a recurring guest role as Ira’s girlfriend Marianne on Mad About You—for which she won an Emmy—and returned to the big screen with The Opportunists, a low-budget crime movie set in Brooklyn.
By now, a pattern has started to emerge in Lauper’s film work. She plays brassy broads in ensemble comedies with stacked casts, shot where she can take the subway to work. The Opportunists checks many of these boxes; the Christopher Walken-led film depicts the blue-collar crime world hidden in the cracks of the outer boroughs. Unlike the previous two films, The Opportunists gives Lauper the chance to stretch her talents in a dramatic role.
Vic Kelly (Walken) has retired from a life of crime for a job as a mechanic, but when work starts to dry up, he’s unable to pay for his aunt’s stay in a nursing home. When a distant cousin shows up on Vic’s doorstep, they join forces with blue-collar criminals who are planning to rob a factory where one of them works. While the plot is pretty standard fare, the deliberate pacing, desaturated color palette, and downbeat tone feel like an elegy not only for Vic but for the kinds of low-budget crime movies from New York that would get distribution after a few screenings at Sundance and play for a week at the Lincoln Plaza before fading into obscurity.
The Opportunists was billed as Lauper’s first dramatic role, and she holds her own opposite Walken as Vic’s bartender girlfriend Sally. With her brightly colored hoodies and bleached blonde hair, she looks the way Lauper may have looked if she’d stayed in Queens, and her natural warmth and calmer energy balance out Walken’s more stylized performance. The pair have a pleasing lived-in chemistry, and viewers may want to yell at Vic to take Sally’s advice and walk away from this caper. (Lauper would take on a similar role in the indie film Here and There, in which her disappointed ex-girlfriend character unwittingly sets the plot into action when she kicks her ex-boyfriend out of her apartment and tells him to get a job.)
Since the release of The Opportunists, Lauper has kept busy as a singer, with the release of two acclaimed traditional blues albums; as an activist, with the launch of her True Colors live shows that raised money for the Human Rights Campaign; and as a composer, with her Tony-winning score for the musical Kinky Boots. While she’s shown greater confidence with every role she’s taken, acting in movies hasn’t been as great a priority for her. As Lauper eases into retirement from live music, you can’t help but wonder if she might make a go for the little gold man who’d make her an EGOT.
