Aaliyah’s casting in highlighted her career's game-changing transition in the early 2000s. And unlike her character, a mere fictional monarch from the mind of best-selling fantasy author Anne Rice, Aaliyah was held up as real-life royalty in the R&B community by the time she landed her second big-screen role. Crossing over from music artist to movie star was an organic, if not expected, evolutionary step for Aaliyah’s trajectory. But Akasha, the adaptation’s other-worldly antagonist, became the singer's final role on the silver screen (following the previous year’s Jet Li vehicle ).