10 Musicians Who Almost Have an EGOT


America’s pop culture equivalent of a tennis player taking down the Grand Slam of pro tournaments, a performer completes what’s known as the EGOT when their career includes winning an Emmy Award for television, a Grammy Award for music, an Oscar (Academy Award) for film, and a Tony Award for theatre. There are just 21 members of this exclusive club, first established when producer and composer Richard Rodgers completed his set with an Emmy win in 1962. Yet it’s also a club that has tripled in size since the turn of the century.
Lately it’s been fascinating to watch artists cross-pollinate media for more opportunities to approach this milestone. Actors might win Grammys for spoken-word narration, for example, while musicians can win Tonys as producers instead of performers. Not only have things been moving faster (three EGOTs wrapped last year, including Elton John’s), they’ve been trending younger and more musical. All winners aged 40 or younger have appeared since 2014, and most of the 21st century EGOT winners are musical professionals of some sort.
Being deep in “awards season” now, as multiple ceremonies honor the best in filmed art with the Grammys thrown in for good measure, Treble wanted to explore who in the music realm might join the EGOT club in the near future. We’re pretty subjectively ranking a top 10 list of living musicians who almost have an EGOT—meaning they’ve won three of the four necessary awards—from longest shot to surest bet to complete their trophy collection. Some will be familiar to longtime readers, some will feel out of place. And weirdly enough, all are just missing either an Oscar or a Tony.
10. Paul McCartney
Missing: Tony Award
All roads lead to Abbey Road, as The Beatles touch just about every form of media out there. The band’s music has been adapted for theatre in the past, from Beatlemania touring revues in the 1970s and 1980s to Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas mashup show Love. Surviving drummer Ringo Starr is also a Tony short of the EGOT, yet bassist McCartney has long seemed more creatively furtive and curious. His exploits include developing a musical theatre version of Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life, but a business dispute scuttled it in 2024. So will he or anyone in the aging Beatleverse pour more resources into another production?
9. Common
Missing: Tony Award
The 52-year-old Chicago artist has been a man of firsts recently. In 2017 he became the first rapper to win an Emmy, Oscar, and Grammy. Then he made his stage debut in the 2022–23 Broadway production of Pulitzer Prize-winning play Between Riverside and Crazy, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. That he sniffed success in the theatre so quickly might be addictive, opening up more paths to act, rhyme, or finance a show in the future.
8. Bette Midler
Missing: Oscar
The Divine Miss M first broke through on New York theatre stages big and very, very small, accompanied by Barry Manilow and singing the words of The Who. She parlayed that into many contemporary pop albums and hits as well as a screen career punctuated by madcap comedy (Hocus Pocus, Ruthless People) and earnest drama (Beaches, For the Boys). Even if she can’t pin down a new role to get her those sentimental-favorite votes from the Academy, she could still conceivably produce the right movie or sing the right song for it.
7. Billy Porter
Missing: Oscar
This slot could have just as easily gone to Hugh Jackman, also solid as both a musician and a thespian. But Jackman feels like an actor who sings, while Porter’s a singer who can act. Les Miserables and The Greatest Showman notwithstanding, Jackman’s X-Men rep also typecasts him a bit. Porter seems like he could lift up an affecting arthouse drama (like he did on TV with Pose) or a big-budget animated singalong (like he did with 2021’s live-action Cinderella). He definitely has enough time in his career to either build an ironclad film resumé or stumble on the role of a lifetime. Porter’s also done one thing that Jackman hasn’t: direct a feature film.
6. Barbra Streisand
Missing: Tony Award
It feels wrong that someone so celebrated for their stage presence and divadom is—of all things!—missing a Tony Award for the EGOT. In reality, Barbra Streisand’s theatre experiences were very early and very few in a career that transformed to a decades-long torrent of TV variety-show spots, music in the studio and on tour, and movies. Even though she’s maintained a low performance profile for the last few years, she seems more than capable of following Midler’s example and heading back to Broadway for one last hurrah. Barring that, she’s made more money than God and could just finance the next big thing.
5. Randy Newman
Missing: Tony Award
Randy Newman has been a storytelling Gemini for decades, weaving acerbic tales from Los Angeles and its surroundings as well as soundtracking multiple hero’s journeys for animated films. Could Disney recreate something like Toy Story and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” onstage? Wouldn’t be the first time. Does Newman authorize or produce a revue from his catalog, make brand new music, or even get on stage himself? He’s been down such roads before. At age 81 Newman may be running out of time to participate in a project for Tony consideration, but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.
4. Audra McDonald
Missing: Oscar
Arguably the gold standard of Broadway performance, Audra McDonald has more Tony Awards than any other actor across all of their major acting categories—six wins across 10 nominations in a 30-year period. She also built on that stagecraft to win Emmy and Grammy awards performing Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, respectively. McDonald still seems to be finding her footing in front of cameras, but she was a featured singer in 2017’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, costarred in biopics about Bayard Rustin and Aretha Franklin, and has TV chops earned on CBS’s The Good Fight and small-screen adaptations of musicals and plays.
3. Ludwig Göransson
Missing: Tony Award
This Swedish producer and composer has had an absolute rocket strapped to his career. He’s been a go-to music man for important Black creators like Donald Glover and Ryan Coogler, and created scores for Tenet, Oppenheimer, and multiple Disney properties. The results? It’s taken him only since 2019 to get three-quarters of the way to an EGOT. His work could be leveraged in a stage adaptation of one of these existing stories or in a jukebox musical. He could also just create orchestrations out of thin air for a new production.
2. Trent Reznor
Missing: Tony Award
I don’t know if Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (also a Tony short of the EGOT) scribbled “Broadway” on last year’s shortlist of where Nine Inch Nails would head next but damn, there are so many ways for that to work. Reznor could use music under his own name, with Ross, as NIN or heck, even with How to Destroy Angels. It could be a jukebox revue, a whole new musical, or Ghosts-like backgrounds for a play. The Year Zero story is still sitting there ripe for adaptation, or Reznor could be the money man behind another script of his choosing. And though he may not perform onstage, why couldn’t Reznor cop a Tony for sound or stage design, new applications of hallmarks of the NIN experience?
1. Jon Batiste
Missing: Tony Award
The spiritual successor to Harry Connick, Jr. as a creative ambassador for New Orleans, at age 38 Jon Batiste is the youngest artist on this list. He knocked out the first three parts of the EGOT between 2020 and 2022 thanks to scoring Soul for Pixar alongside Reznor and Ross, producing an NCAA March Madness segment for a Sports Emmy, and his sixth studio album We Are. But even these don’t really drive home Batiste’s diversity of musical skill. Check out his viral take on Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” track down his polyglot set from Coachella 2024, peep the production on his music videos. The man knows how to bandlead, costume, and command a stage. There’s no guarantee this would translate to a Tony Award-winning performance or production, but Jon Batiste has all the time in the world to try.
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Adam Blyweiss is associate editor of Treble. A graphic designer and design teacher by trade, Adam has written about music since his 1990s college days and been published at MXDWN and e|i magazine. Based in Philadelphia, Adam has also DJ’d for terrestrial and streaming radio from WXPN and WKDU.