Beyoncé played Carmen Brown in the 2001 MTV film Carmen: A Hip Hopera.
Carmen: A Hip Hopera is a modern musical adaptation of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, which itself was based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée. Beyoncé played the title character, renamed Carmen Brown, while Mekhi Phifer portrayed Hill, the film’s counterpart to Don José.
The film was directed by Robert Townsend and produced for MTV. It transferred the story from nineteenth-century Spain into a contemporary American setting and used hip-hop, R&B, and spoken dialogue alongside musical performances.
This role came before Beyoncé’s major solo-film appearances in Austin Powers in Goldmember and Dreamgirls. Carmen Brown should not be confused with characters from Shakespeare: Carmen is an operatic and literary figure, not a Shakespearean role.