acting
Carey began to take professional acting lessons in 1997, and in the coming year, she was auditioning for film roles. She made her debut as an opera singer in the romantic comedy The Bachelor (1999), starring Chris O’Donnell and Renée Zellweger. CNN referred derisively to her casting as a talentless diva as “letter-perfect […] the “can’t act” part informs Carey’s entire performance”.[77]
Carey’s first starring role was in Glitter (2001), in which she played a struggling musician in the 1980s who breaks into the music industry after meeting a disc jockey (Max Beesley). Though Roger Ebert said “[Carey]’s acting ranges from dutiful flirtatiousness to intense sincerity”,[78] most critics panned it: Halliwell’s Film Guide called it a “vapid star vehicle for a pop singer with no visible acting ability”,[79] and The Village Voice observed: “When [Carey] tries for an emotion—any emotion—she looks as if she’s lost her car keys.”[80] Glitter was a box office failure, and Carey earned a Razzie Award for her role. She later said that the film “started out as a concept with substance, but it ended up being geared to 10-year-olds. It lost a lot of grit […] I kind of got in over my head.”[51]
Carey, Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters co-starred as waitresses at a mobster-operated restaurant in the independent film WiseGirls (2002), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but went straight to cable in the U.S. Critics commended Carey for her efforts—The Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Those scathing notices for Glitter will be a forgotten memory for the singer once people warm up to Raychel”,[81] and Roger Friedman, referring to her as “a Thelma Ritter for the new millennium”, said, “Her line delivery is sharp and she manages to get the right laughs”.[82] WiseGirls producer Anthony Esposito cast Carey in The Sweet Science (2006), a film about an unknown female boxer recruited by a boxing manager, but it never entered production.[83]
Carey was one of several musicians who appeared in the independently produced Damon Dash films Death of a Dynasty (2003) and State Property 2 (2005). Her television work has been limited to a January 2002 episode of Ally McBeal. In 2006, Carey joined the cast of the indie film Tennessee (2008), taking the role of a waitress who travels with her two brothers to find their long-lost father.[84] JoBlo.com reported in June 2007 that Carey would join the cast of Adam Sandler’s upcoming film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, playing herself
