Yahoo Lifestyle 17 Actors Who Learned Unique And Impressive Skills For A Role
Oftentimes, movies and TV shows use stunt doubles or body doubles to create scenes where a character needs to do something the actor can't. Sometimes, however, actors take the time to learn something unique for a role (even if they still have a double).
Here are 17 actors who learned unique and impressive skills for a role:
1.To prepare for her role as opera star Maria Callas in Maria, Angelina Jolie, who "had not sung in public" before, learned to sing opera. She "spent almost seven months training because when you work with Pablo [Larraín, the director], you can't do anything by half."
During a press conference at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, she said, "He demands, in the most wonderful way, that you really do the work and you really learn and train...My first time singing, I remember being so nervous. My sons were there and they helped lock the door so that nobody else was coming in, and I was shaky. Pablo, in his decency, started me in a small room and ended me in La Scala. So he gave me time to grow."
2.To play the musically inclined French vampire Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire, Sam Reid learned French, singing, and piano.
In 2022, he told the Syndey Morning Herald, "It’s the biggest show I’ve definitely ever worked on and I’ve never had the chance to play a role this complicated that has so much information to absorb – my character has an arc written out over thousands of pages to explore. It was daunting, and the level of preparation went down to learning French, learning piano, learning to sing."
You can listen to him sing in character in the Season 3 teaser below:
For a single scene in Season 1, Episode 6, he learned dog training as well.
In 2022, he told Vanity Fair, "This is a [showrunner] Rolin Jones special, he would give you this extraordinary monologue, or this extraordinary scene. But he'll also say, 'Here is this whole other bunch of stuff that you have to do in it.'
It did take me quite a long time to get to know that dog and to be able to do that whole speech, and get the dog to do what I needed it to do and get back into the cage without having to cut the scene up or anything like that. There were a lot of little things that we were always having to do to make the scenes flow.
There was a conversation about what kind of a dog it was going to be. Originally it was something much smaller, but the mastiff ended up being the one that everyone went with, and I was really, really, really happy about that. Lestat loves mastiffs. He's had a lot of them in his life. That was his first great loss, his mastiff."
3.For The Brothers Bloom, Rachel Weisz had two weeks to learn how to convincingly portray her character's eccentric hobbies, including violin, piano, banjo, guitar, karate, skateboarding, juggling, and riding a unicycle. However, she took more time to learn a "really complicated" card trick from an expert who was flown in from the UK.
In 2010, she told the Scotsman, "I spent weeks and weeks learning the trick. Before we started, I couldn't even shuffle a deck, so I always had a pack of cards with me, and I had to practice every single day."
Here's the clip of her performing the card trick:
4.For a The Pursuit of Happyness scene where his character gains entrance to an internship by showing a stockbroker his impressive Rubik's Cube skills, Will Smith learned how to solve the puzzle from World Cube Association co-founder Tyson Mao.
In 2007, Tyson told the Chicago Tribune, "After 10 hours, Will Smith was able to solve the Rubik’s Cube on his own, without anything. Not only learning the process, but committing it to memory...The first thought was that we could get a hand double...Will Smith didn’t want that. It seemed to me he wanted to really just understand the character, so he wanted to learn to solve the Rubik’s Cube on his own, and he wanted to do this genuinely on-camera."
Here's the scene:
5.For La La Land, Ryan Gosling learned to play piano in three months, and all of Sebastian's piano playing is really him!
Liz Kinnon, a jazz musician, taught him how to play.
In 2017, she told Woman & Home, "Ryan is very musical, but he'd played very little piano before we met and had no training. So he asked if we could practice two hours a day, five days a week. Of course, Ryan couldn't read music, and we only had around three months to practice, so he decided to learn all the songs by memory. We'd sit together at an upright piano in his living room, him on a stool and me on a chair next to him, and take it in turns to play — I'd show him how to play something, he'd try to duplicate it, then I'd make corrections. We didn't even stop for breaks — he was a very conscientious student."
Here's a clip:
6.For an underwater scene in Suicide Squad, Margot Robbie did four sessions with a free diver, who taught her how to hold her breath for up to five minutes.
She and her stunt double competed to see who could learn to hold their breath the longest.
In 2016, she told The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, "I got to five minutes, and I was like, 'You know what, this is above and beyond what I thought I'd get to. I'm good. I'm good with five. She did one extra session. She goes, 'I got to five and a half.' And I was like, 'I need another session!' And they were like, 'No one needs to drown over this...The scene takes one minute. You don't need to do this.'"
Here's the scene:
7.To play freediver Ronal in Avatar: The Way of Water, Kate Winslet learned to hold her breath underwater for a long time. She got up to seven minutes and 15 seconds, breaking Tom Cruise's previously held record for a person holding their breath for a movie.
In 2022, she told Total Film, "Well, I didn't have to hold my breath for over seven minutes. It's just that the opportunity to set a record presented itself. I wanted to break my own record, which was already six minutes and 14 seconds. And I was like, 'Come on!' So I smashed my own record by a minute."
8.To play the titular role in Wednesday, Jenna Ortega learned to play cello. She started her lessons about two months before filming.
In 2022, she told Wired, "I probably couldn't play too well now, just because I've been away from home so much working. It is something I want to continue to pursue. I have immense respect for anybody who plays the cello. I think it's such a delightful instrument."
Here's a scene where Wednesday plays the cello:
9.For his role as highwire artist Philippe Petit in The Walk, Joseph Gordon-Levit learned how to walk on a highwire from Philippe himself.
In 2015, Joseph told Conan, "I spent, like, eight days straight with this guy, and, you know, not everyone who's good at something is good at teaching that thing. So I wasn't sure how it was gonna go, but it turns out he's a fantastic, fantastic teacher."
Joseph and his stunt double recreated Philippe's famous World Trade Center walk on 12-foot-high wires on a soundstage.
Here's a clip:
10.To play katana-wielding Michonne on The Walking Dead, Danai Gurira worked with a sword trainer before shooting began. During filming, she worked swords into her normal workout routine.
In 2012, she told the Chicago Tribune, "It was extremely intense at the beginning, extremely intense. I did not know those muscles were in the body. It hurt, and it was exhausting. … I work out, but this was just a whole other thing. You do your little dumbbells, and you're getting somewhere, but the katana just totally will break you. And I love it for that. But it was a lot of work …
Thankfully, I felt pretty comfortable with it by the time we started shooting, so I was able to actually contribute to how we put together a scene of killing zombies… That was great when I got to the point where I went from not lying on my back going [Wahhhh!], like crawling. I could walk a few steps. It's very enjoyable and exhilarating, but it's extremely intense, and there's so much to learn all the time."
Watch one of Danai's fight scenes below:
11.For A Quiet Place, director/star John Krasinski and the rest of the cast learned American Sign Language.
He also took cues from costar Millicent Simmonds.
In 2018, he told the Wrap, "Not only are you so happy and honored to have a deaf actress performing this role, but you also have a guide throughout this entire story. Because in our story, our daughter is deaf in our family, I found myself asking her all the time, 'Is this right?' And she would be like, 'Maybe do it more like this?" She was not intimidated at all."
12.To play Ruben Stone, a drummer who experiences hearing loss, in Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed spent seven months learning ASL from coach Jeremy Lee Stone, who also taught him about the Deaf community.
In 2020, Riz told Variety, "Darius [Marder, the writer/director] wanted everything to be real. He wanted me to be on screen and playing the drums. By immersing myself in it, when Ruben can be fluent in ASL, I'm able to try and get as close as possible to fluency myself, so we could improvise.
Jeremy told me that communicating in ASL is different than communicating in English because it was more emotional. You're listening with your whole body and you're communicating with your whole body. I've said it before, but I think Jeremy and the Deaf community taught me the real meaning of the words listening and communication. Ultimately, it was out of respect. I didn't want to say, 'Teach me a couple of words in ASL.'
If Ruben, as a character, is trying to learn about Deaf culture in his film, then I want to authentically be learning about Deaf culture. I wanted to respect this culture that I was so lucky to be welcomed into by Jeremy and his friends."
He also learn to play the drums from musician Guy Licata.
Riz told Variety, "Drumming and ASL are both non-verbal means of communication. They both shared the same challenge for someone word-oriented like myself, to get past that crutch and communicate with my body. That was the challenge."
Here's a clip:
13.To play ballerina-turned-spy Dominika Egorova in Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence trained in ballet for four hours a day, five days a week with "the ballet-boot-camp guy," former New York City ballet member Kurt Froman. She learned all of the choreography for her dancing scenes, even though only the top half of her body is shown onscreen.
In a featurette from the film's Blu-ray release, Jennifer said, "The level of training that ballerinas go through and the level of discipline, so many years of their lives, it comes to play in everything they do. The way they carry themselves, the way they handle themselves and the way they work. It was something that was constantly on my mind even after we wrapped all the dancing."
She also had a dance double, principal dancer Isabella Boylston of the American Ballet Theater.
Here's a clip where you can see Jennifer (and her dance double) dancing:
14.For his role as playwright Jonathan Larson in Tick, Tick... Boom!, Andrew Garfield spent a year studying voice and piano. Before he was offered the role, director Lin-Manuel Miranda asked Greg Miele, his massage therapist who happens to be Andrew's good friend, if the actor could sing — and Greg lied on Andrew's behalf!
On The Graham Norton Show, Andrew said, "Greg, without missing a beat, just immediately said, 'Oh my God, he has the voice!' ...The massage ends, and Greg immediately calls me and says, 'Hey buddy, can you sing? 'Cause you have to be able to sing, 'cause now my reputation is on the line.'"
Here's a clip of Andrew singing in the movie:
15.To play Jackson Pollock in the biopic Pollock, Ed Harris learned to action paint like the famous artist. He built a home art studio in 1994 and imitated the painter's style, pulling from Hans Namuth's 1950 recordings of him at work.
In 2001, Ed told the Guardian, "Pollock tried to put the act of painting on canvas. That was his revelation. I began early on, at the tail end of the '80s and through the '90s. I painted on wood. I did relatively abstract stuff. I tried to create things that had harmonics and rhythms. I didn't always succeed, but it was about the effort. I got an inkling of what it was about to look down at that board."
Here's a clip of Ed painting in the movie:
16.Before Singin' in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds had no dance training, which frustrated director/costar Gene Kelly. She only had three months to learn, so she "was dancing eight hours a day, nonstop."
In her memoir Unsinkable, she wrote, "One day I was lying under the piano sobbing when I heard a voice ask, ‘Why are you crying?' 'I feel like I’m going to die. It’s so hard. I can’t…I can’t…'"
The person comforting her was Fred Astaire, who assured her than he also got frustrated sometimes and invited her to watch his Royal Wedding dance rehearsals.
Here's a clip of Debbie dancing alongside her costars:
17.And finally, Chadwick Boseman "truly learned to play" the trumpet for his role as Levee Green in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.
In a featurette, his costar Colman Domingo said, "I think everyone was like, 'Oh, that’s what you’re doing, Chad? Okay, now I’m gonna learn too.' I love that [Chadwick's] like, 'Yeah, I'm gonna challenge you. We're gonna challenge each other.'"
Here's a clip:
