Celebs with extra skills to pay the bills
The stars who have learned a whole new craft for a role
They say that acting is a “craft”, but when it comes to some performances, the word takes on a whole new meaning. What may make up five minutes of a film can take five months of learning, honing and mastering a whole new skill for an actor. So, while you might think being a movie star seems a pretty cushty gig, we’ve discovered that a hell of a lot of time and effort went into some of our favourite performances.
THE CREATIVES
Nominated for Best Actor and Best Picture at the Oscars in 2018, it’s clear Bradley Cooper poured his heart and soul into A Star Is Born. The actor learned to sing, play guitar and piano, and even to drop the register of his voice in line with his gruff character. “We mapped out my entire schedule, day by day,” Bradley
revealed in an interview. “I’d wake up and work out, followed by two hours of guitar practice and two hours of piano lessons. Lunch. Then Lukas Nelson [the son of country star Willie Nelson] would come over, and we’d write music.”
Adrien Brody similarly overhauled his entire life for his role as Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman in The Pianist. He not only practised piano for four hours each day, but to really embody the character he ditched his privileged life – even leaving his then-girlfriend.
“I gave up my apartment, I sold my car, I disconnected the phones, and I left,” he said in 2003. “I took two bags and my keyboard and moved to Europe.”
And while Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike dance moves may be infamous, for the Coen Brothers’ Hail Caesar! he embarked on something he’d never done before with tap dancing. Choreographer Christopher Gattelli says the actor crammed ten years of tap training into three months. Channing later said, “It’s the most I’ve ever prepped for a six-minute section in a movie.”
THE ATHLETES
When an actor takes on a role playing a real-life person, it goes without saying they have to put in the graft in order to wholly embody that character. So, when Joseph Gordon-levitt took on the role of daredevil wire walker Philippe Petit for The Walk, he went to the man himself for training. Philippe – who, in 1974, walked between New York’s Twin Towers on a wire – trained with Joseph for just eight days.
Of his teacher, Joseph said, “Because he’s such a positive thinker, he was convinced that
I’d be able to get up on that wire and walk by myself. He ended up convincing me. Once I believed in myself, then I was able to do it.” Even though the films were fantasy, Jennifer Lawrence still had to make her archery skills look realistic for her turn as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise. Luckily, she had an Olympian archer on hand to teach her how to handle a bow. Khatuna Lorig had just 15 days to teach Jen, and she did such a good job, interest in the sport boomed. Katniss’ skills as an archer inspired membership of the USA Archery body to go up by 84 per cent after the first film.
While Margot Robbie’s legacy from Suicide Squad seems to be a Halloween costume, the actress dedicated six months to training in gymnastics, boxing, weapons, aerial silks and roller skating for her role as Harley Quinn. But topping her list of new skills has to be the ability to hold her breath for five minutes. For an underwater fight scene, Margot trained with a free-diver who taught her all about pushing past the point of oxygen-deprived convulsions.
“It’s all about lowering your metabolic rate,” Margot has revealed. “You kind of meditate underwater. It’s amazing.” A definite “don’t try this at home” moment, which also applies to one of Bryan Cranston’s talents...
THE BIZARRE AND THE CONTROVERSIAL
The reason he seemed so convincing cooking meth as Walter White in Breaking Bad? He was taught by DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) chemists exactly how to make the drug. Although Bryan insists he and co-star Aaron Paul never actually cooked real meth, he once teased that he might have been allowed to try a batch. “Maybe… I can’t tell you one way or the other,” he said in an interview. “It’s extremely difficult [to cook meth]. There are so many volatile components to it that, at any given time, you could literally blow up.”
Dealing with similarly volatile components, it seems, was Natalie Portman for her Oscarwinning role in Black Swan. After she was praised for her convincing performance of a prima ballerina, her dance double, Sarah Lane, spoke out to say, “They’re completely lying about the amount of dancing that Natalie did in the movie.” Sarah argued that film-makers wanted audiences to believe Natalie was capable of a level of talent that could take decades to achieve – “something that is pretty much impossible”. Sarah was even asked to stop doing interviews until after the Oscars, as it was “bad for Natalie’s image”. Awkward… ■
‘It’s the most I ever prepared for a movie’