Blink and you’ll miss it: Pop star cameos

By BBC

Not content with breaking every existing chart record over the weekend, Ed Sheeran is adding yet another bullet point to his CV.

He’s set to make a cameo appearance in the seventh season of Game of Thrones.

What role he’ll be playing is still under wraps, but let’s hope it won’t be as prominent as his album is in the charts or no other actors will get a look in.

It’s not even Ed’s first cameo appearance in a TV show – he previously appeared (and sang) in a 2015 episode of Home and Away.

Sheeran is far from the first to make a brief appearance in a film or TV show – here’s some other pop star cameos you may not have spotted.

Cheryl in What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Cheryl’s experience as a judge on a talent show came in handy when she made a cameo appearance as a judge on a talent show.

The currently un-surnamed singer traded in The X Factor for the fictional Celebrity Dance Factor where she judged the performance of Cameron Diaz’s character in 2012.

Cheryl may well have revisited the movie’s subject matter more recently for research purposes.

Rihanna in Bring It On: All or Nothing

The Bring it On series of films has brought us many stone cold classics – such as Bring it On: In It to Win It and Bring it On: Fight to the Finish.

But it was the 2006 masterpiece Bring it On: All or Nothing, starring Hayden Panettiere and Solange Knowles, that gave us a delightful cameo appearance from Rihanna.

Four years before she turned to S&M, a younger and more innocent RiRi was in the film offering a prize to budding cheerleading squads.

Her cameo saw her announcing that the winners of a high school competition would win an appearance in her new music video.

Boy George in The A-Team

Boy George appeared in a 1986 episode of The A-Team called Cowboy George playing, you guessed it, the title role.

In the episode, Face comes up with a money-making scheme that involves booking bands for gigs, but not actually paying them to perform.

The star becomes furious Face is pocketing the profits from a Culture Club gig and turns up demanding what they’re due.

Highlights of the episode include Boy George kicking down a door and Mr T dancing to Karma Chameleon.

Drake in Anchorman 2

To be honest, we could do an entire feature on all the cameo appearances in Anchorman 2.

Kanye West, Will Smith, Harrison Ford, Sacha Baron Cohen, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey all crop up in the 2012 film.

Many of them appear in the star-studded battle of the news crews at the end of the Will Ferrell movie.

But Drake’s guest appearance is actually right at the beginning – when his character err… expresses his approval, shall we say, of Christina Applegate’s looks.

Ian Brown and Jarvis Cocker in the Harry Potter films

Hidden deep inside the 19 hours and 40 minutes of Harry Potter films are cameo appearances from some of UK music’s biggest stars.

Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown and Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker both appear in the big screen adaptations of the JK Rowling franchise.

Ariana Grande in Scream Queens

As a rule, cameos are generally short.

Ariana Grande’s appearance in comedy-horror show Scream Queens certainly fell into this category, as she was so cruelly killed off at the end of her scene.

The singer appeared Side to Side with the likes of Lea Michele and Emma Roberts when she starred in the show’s 2015 pilot episode.

But her foray into acting was short lived as she was murdered by a scary, masked knife-wielding devil.

However, Ariana brilliantly came back to life just long enough to send out a tweet to her followers to let them know she was being murdered.

Sadly not together.

Brown is briefly seen stirring a cup of tea in The Prisoner of Azkaban while Cocker portrayed Myron Wagtail, the lead singer of The Weird Sisters, in The Goblet of Fire.

Snoop Dogg in basically everything

This feature simply wouldn’t be complete without Snoop Dogg. If there was an outstanding contribution to cameos award, he should win it.

He made a wonderful appearance as himself in 2015’s Pitch Perfect 2 and has also cropped up in Bruno, Entourage, Bones and 2004’s Starsky & Hutch.

His undisputed peak, however, is surely still to come.

The rapper has repeatedly said he’d love to appear in Coronation Street. He first mentioned it during a trip to Manchester in 2010.

We will simply not rest until we’ve seen him ordering a pint in The Rovers. Get to work, ITV.