Many times, someone can surprise you with Hidden Depths. And among those depths hidden within can be a musical talent that the world has yet to see. The people listed here are the ones who caught the world off-guard by their vocal talent. Many of these people are ones who aren't known for singing at all. Others may show just how good at singing they really are after being mostly seen as Auto-Tuners.
Sister Trope of He Really Can Act. Can cross with The Cast Showoff. The difference being that this is specific fan-reaction to someone showing off their singing ability, while The Cast Showoff is when creators alter a work to a degree specifically to let someone showoff their non-acting talent. Note that examples are listed by creator in bold.
Examples:
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Films — Animation
- Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson already proved himself as a skilled actor after being a well-known wrestler. His role as Maui in Moana had him receive extensive praise for his ability to sing and rap "You're Welcome".
- Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie: Keith Silverstein isn't usually thought of as a singer, but he manages to acquit himself well with "Chaos Will Reign Today
", a Villain Song and one of the film's standout musical numbers. - Madagascar 1: Jarosław Boberek (who voices King Julien in the Polish dub) absolutely slayed Polish version of "I Like to Move It" to the point that song has reached cult status in Poland and is considered to be superior than original English version.
- Ralph Fiennes in The Prince of Egypt. During "The Plagues," while Amick Bryam filled in for Val Kilmer as Moses, the classically trained Fiennes sang Ramses' lyrics himself — and you can hear the betrayal and fury in Pharaoh's voice when he does so.
- Robin Williams received enormous praise for his performance of the energetic number "Friend Like Me" in Aladdin (1992, Disney).
- Sing: Scarlett Johansson plays the punk-rock porcupine Ash; while Johannson has a few albums out, she's better-known for dramatic or action roles such as Natasha Romanov/Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or as Samantha in H.E.R.. She has a surprisingly powerful voice during "Set It All Free", one of the only original songs in the film.
Films — Live-Action
- Andrew Garfield had never sung professionally prior to being cast as the lead role of Jonathan in the musical tick, tick... BOOM!, and took vocal lessons to prepare. His performance was widely praised and multi-awarded, with critics and audiences expressing surprise at his musicality.
- For The Sound of Music, Christopher Plummer insisted that his voice be dubbed over, as he was not a trained singer and he did not feel confident in his singing abilities. However, he did make attempts at singing "The Sound of Music", "Edelweiss", and "Something Good" for the film, and a version of "Edelweiss" with his original vocals was eventually discovered and distributed on the Internet, and a lot of commentators have said they preferred his version to the one that was used in the film. The album's Super Deluxe Edition includes Plummer's renditions of all three of these songs as bonus tracks.
- Clint Eastwood is one of Hollywood's most epic legends, possible one of the biggest Memetic Badass in entertainment. He also showed off some rather decent singing ability in Paint Your Wagon when he sang "I Still See Elisa" and "I Talk to the Trees". His costar Lee Marvin had this reaction too. His song "Wand'rin' Star", became a huge hit across the world.
- Idris Elba is better known for his acting work, but has been actively involved in music from a young age, and concurrent to his breakthrough in The Wire and Luther he was also working with rappers and other artists. But it was in 2015, when UK Grime artist Skepta's "Shutdown" was a minor hit, and Idris Elba rapped on a remix of the song, that his skill on the mic became more widely known.
- Keira Knightley did her own singing in Begin Again, and was widely praised for her performance.
- Robert Downey Jr. released an album called The Futurist and one of the songs from the album, "Broken", was featured in his film Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (as heard in the closing credits).
- Steve Buscemi in Armageddon (1998) does quite a job singing harmony on "Leaving on a Jet Plane." Ben Affleck and Michael Clark Duncan's characters are both a little off-key in their singing, which helps make Buscemi's voice stand out.
Live-Action TV
- None of the characters on The Andy Griffith Show expected Gomer Pyle to have a great voice until they hear him singing to himself- overlaps with The Cast Showoff, as Jim Nabors was a trained vocalist with a rich baritone voice.
- In the third season of The Boys, the mute Kimiko has a couple of daydreams wherein she starts singing with a beautiful voice. It's the actress's own voice and it comes quite as a surprise to the audience who has never heard her speak, much less sing angelically.
- Britain's Got Talent had Paul Potts and Susan Boyle. Both had studied signing but weren't actively working and performing at the time. Potts was working as a mobile phone retailer and Boyle was encouraged to enter a contest to appear in the series. Both wowed judges with their performace.
- Doom Patrol (2019): "Immortimas Patrol" features almost the entire cast singing, including Michelle Gomez and Madeline Zima, neither of whom have much experience in musical theatre. According to Zima, the less-experienced singers relied heavily on Abi Monterey, the cast's youngest member, for guidance, as most of her background is in musical theatre.
- The television competition series The Masked Singer:
- T-Pain. As the winner of Season 1, he showed off an impressive vocal range, especially considering that T-Pain had been well-known for his use of Auto-Tune (as a stylistic choice, not to cover mistakes). His performances of "I Don't Want To Be" and "Stay With Me" really showed off just how good he can sing.
- Chloe Kim is most famous for being an Olympic snowboarder, but in the guise of The Jellyfish, she performed well enough make it to the semi-finals in season 4, managing to outlast even a few seasoned singers like Paul Anka and Clint Black.
- Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger: Chief Justice Rita Kaniska is usually The Stoic with minimal social ability. #38 shows that they're an impressive singer; wooing the crowd with a fantastic song during Minongan's idol competition. The others assume this is an indicator of Hidden Depths and spend the episode trying to get Rita to fess up, only for the judge to get mad and reveal that no, they really were just infiltrating the competition and nothing else. This becomes a Brick Joke in Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger vs. Kyoryuger, where their Alternate Self becomes an idol whose life isn't as miserable as the other rangers.
- Psych takes every opportunity to show off Dule Hill's singing chops, especially in episodes such as "American Duos" (Where he and Shawn perform on an American Idol-esque show) and "High Top Fade Out" (where he sings a Capella version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", much to Shawn's delight).
- Invoked on an episode of Spicks and Specks when guest Jane Badler gave a stunning performance during a round of "Substitute" (where contestants have to sing songs substitute the words of the song for the text of an unrelated book). Afterwards the host Adam Hills remarked "Right now there will be a whole bunch of people going, "The lady from V (1983) can sing?!'", referring to the fact that many science-fiction fans would have been unaware of Jane's long career in cabaret and musical theatre.
Music
- EJAE struggled to break into the K-Pop industry for 10 years, only managing to get songwriting and producing gigs due to her age. It was in this capacity that she wrote for KPop Demon Hunters, whereupon her performance for its demo tracks became a Permanent Placeholder in the finished product. The film's status as a chart-topping multi-platinum Sleeper Hit effectively ensured her breakthrough since then.
- Kesha for a long time had an image of a party girl thanks to her debut song "Tik Tok", which used Auto-Tune quite a bit. People started realizing that she really had singing skills with the release of her album Deconstructed in 2012. And then in 2017, she released her song "Praying", where she really showed off just how good she can sing when she hits an F6 whistle note.
- Milli Vanilli: In the wake of the lipsynching scandal that sank their careers and caused their Grammy award to be retracted, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus proved that they could sing, attempting to record a version of their #1 hit, "Girl You Know It's True", with their actual voices; sadly, their reputation was too tarnished to ever recover, but Morvan managed to get a solo career.
- The Steve Martin song "The Strangest Christmas Yet" contains an In-Universe example. The song takes place at a family Christmas party. One of the guests, Uncle Teddy, is so obese he won't fit through the door and is forced to eat his dinner in the garage. The party is a disaster, but when the family sits down to eat Uncle Teddy starts singing a beautiful rendition of "Joy to the World".
- The TWICE members not named Nayeon or Jihyo (or Jeongyeon, to a lesser extent) tend to be dismissed as weaker vocalists to people who are casual fans at best, but Momo takes the most flak for her alleged lack of singing skills due to her rarely getting to venture very far past the squeaky and nasal voice she uses on many songs and usually having the fewest lines in the group's songs regardless. However, her 2021 cover of "The First Time in the First Place" by Lee Bo-ram surprised many by showing a sweeter and more gentle side that only the most hardcore fans had known about before. Although the squeaky voice turns up from time to time in her official work with subunit MISAMO (most notably on "Bouquet"), she mainly sings in lower registers and gets to flex her skills as a rapper more.
- Victoria Justice was known to be talented when she was cast in the lead role in Victorious, but she was heavily overshadowed by co-stars Ariana Grande and (to a lesser extent) Elizabeth Gillies to the point where her music career was put on ice for several years as Ariana underwent a massive Breakup Breakout amid a fan war over the show's cancellation. Although she's still nowhere near as mainstream as Ariana, Victora's return to music from late 2020 onward has been better received as she showed a noticeable Vocal Evolution that's softer and richer with more range and less reliance on auto-tune. It helps that the dust from the show had settled by the time of her comeback.
Theme Parks
- Nate Torrence is mainly known for voice acting, but he delivers an amazing performance as Clawhauser when he sings the ending song in the Zootopia's ride Zootopia: Better Zoogether at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
Web Animation
- The Amazing Digital Circus: In their cover of the Wacky World 2 song "Happy Place", all of the show's cast members reprise their roles and sing the song. Many of the show's actors are surprisingly good singers.
- hololive: Discussed on a number of occasions by various members, primarily those who hadn't intended to do any singing-related activities. This is not the case with newer generations circa Hololive Japan's Fifth Generation, who debuted 2020, where it's now understood that any accepted talents will be expected to do some sort of idol-related activities such as singing.
- Nekomata Okayu has mentioned that she auditioned and joined Hololive Gamers with the intent of streaming game-related content, and hadn't signed up to do singing or dancing. She even briefly considered outright quitting the company, but was convinced to stay on. This was partially helped by the positive fan reaction to her occasional karaoke streams, where her laid back, calming voice went well with her song selections.
- Kiryu Coco famously described her own voice as "Mickey Mouse on crack" and had no real interest in doing any singing, but eventually relented. One of her trademark songs was "Rockabye" by Clean Bandit. It helps that she would become enthusiastic when singing, doing things like bouncing her model around the screen.
- Airani Iofifteen of Hololive Indonesia's first generation mentioned that when she first auditioned for and was accepted into Hololive, she was completely unaware that they also did concerts and other performances (rather she thought she'd be doing gaming and art streams). Considering she is a polyglot (she speaks at least 5 languages), she turns out to be quite good at singing, and in addition people quickly noticed that she often incorporates sign language during live performances like her birthday lives (leading to joking observations that that's another language she knows).
Western Animation
- Everyone knows John Cena as an awesome wrestler, Nice Guy, and actor, so a few people were surprised when, in the Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "The Evil League of Mutants", his character Baron Draxum ended up singing part of a Villain Song... and did so surprisingly well.
- Christmas Carol: The Movie: Kate Winslet is generally known as an actress, but she got a chance to show off her singing talents with the film's theme song, "What If", in which her character Belle — Scrooge's lost love — wonders how things would have turned out if their relationship had never ended. The song was critically acclaimed, charting in multiple countries.
- Kevin Conroy was, on top of being an excellent voice actor (and widely considered the definitive version of Batman), a surprisingly good singer, which he got to show off a bit of when he sang "Am I Blue?" during an episode of Justice League Unlimited titled This Little Piggy when, in a bid to save Wonder Woman's life, Batman agreed to sing onstage. Needless to say, it was a big Tear Jerker moment.
- Khary Payton is mainly known for voice acting. In the Teen Titans Go! two-part special "Justice League's Next Top Idol Singer", he sings "Shining Like Diamonds" as Cyborg and he delivers an amazing broadway-level performance.
- The Octonauts: In the special The Great Barrier Reef, Barnacles's Non-Singing Voice is done by Simon Foster, who doesn't appear to have done any roles outside of this series. Despite this, Foster manages to give Barnacles an impressively deep singing voice during the "A Thousand Pies" musical number. Some fans have criticized the fact that he sounds nothing like Barnacles's regular speaking voice, but they cannot deny that his voice is rather calming and nice to listen to on its own.
- The Lion Guard:
- Nika Futterman does a fantastic job singing "Lions Over All". Her raspy voice sounds powerful and melodious at the same time. She also pulls off Trilling Rs ("Rrrrruling every animal...") in a way that flows perfectly with the song. Since Futterman is the new voice actor of Zira after Suzanne Pleshette's passing, she had big shoes to fill, and she delivered.
- David Oyelowo is a high-profile Emmy-nominated actor for a reason, though this is the first time he's had to sing, and it is glorious. Just hear him sing "I Have a Plan" and "When I Led the Guard."
- Steve Blum has proven over the years he is a very good voice actor, but many people were surprised at his singing skills when Makucha gets his own song in The Harmattan.
- Seth MacFarlane is know to voice characters like Peter, Dewey, and Brian Griffin, and as Stan Smith and Roger the alien, as well as bit parts in Robot Chicken. He has also released several albums where he sings jazz and swing music in the style of Frank Sinatra, and uses those talents in his shows and movies, as can be also seen in the movie Sing, where he voiced the smooth talking Mike.
- Tara Strong is mainly known for her voice work, but she also has a beautiful singing voice. One example of this is in the Drawn Together Pilot Episode "Hot Tub", in which she sang a duet with Cree Summer called "Black's Chick Tongue" as Princess Clara and Foxxy Love, respectively.