The five most amazing real-life skills actors learned for a movie
Acting is a pretty amazing profession when you think about it. Yes, if you reach the top of Hollywood, there’s a lot of glitz and glamour that comes with the job, and you get to jetset all over the world, attending parties, premieres, and festivals. That’s not what most actors will say is great about it, though.
Instead, the truly enriching part of being an actor is how you’re often afforded the time and opportunity to immerse yourself in different cultures and lifestyles. Audiences and those in the industry expect a certain level of verisimilitude from every performance these days, which means it doesn’t cut the mustard to simply “pretend” anymore. Everything needs to look real – and this is why actors often get the chance to learn amazing real-life skills for their roles.
In modern Hollywood, it’s standard operating practice that actors will do certain things, such as getting in shape for roles and learning fight choreography if they’re making an action movie. However, sometimes, a part requires more specialised training, and this is when an actor can be plunged into a hobby, skill, or activity they previously had no familiarity with.
From a star learning to ice skate to an Olympic level to an actor learning how to walk a high wire and speak fluent French at the same time, here are five of the most amazing real-life skills learned for a movie.
Five most amazing real-life skills actors learned for a movie:
Kate Winslet broke the movie world record for holding your breath underwater
Learning to hold your breath underwater is something many people would be too scared to even attempt. Luckily for Kate Winslet, though, she was in the capable hands of James Cameron – a man who spends more time underwater than on land – and the best diving experts in the biz. Of course, it also helped that she’s a competitive sort who had a fellow Hollywood A-lister’s breath-holding record in her sights.
Well, I don’t know if Winslet set out to break Tom Cruise’s record of six minutes, which he established while shooting Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Whatever her motivation, though, she utterly smashed Cruise’s time on the set of Avatar: The Way of Water by holding her breath for a mind-boggling seven minutes and 15 seconds.
The behind-the-scenes footage of Winslet breaking the record is heartwarming. She immediately asks, “Am I dead? Have I died?” before instantly switching to, “What was my time?” She then gushes, “We need to radio set. I wanted Jim to know right away.” However, a modest Winslet later tried to play down her achievement, telling 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.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt learned how to tightrope walk
In 2015, Joseph Gordon-Levitt played the famed tightrope walker Phillippe Petit in Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk. In 1974, that insane Frenchman performed a death-defying high-wire walk 1,350 feet in the air between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, so it made sense when Gordon-Levitt was cast in the movie that he’d have to learn some elements of the craft. Amazingly, though, he was able to learn directly from the man himself.
Gordon-Levitt spent eight days learning tightrope-walking with Petit, who was confident he’d be able to walk on his own wire unassisted at the end of the workshop. Gordon-Levitt wasn’t so sure, but he told THR, “He’s such a positive thinker, he believed that I would, and because of that, I started to believe I would.” He was right, too – by the end of the eight days, Gordon-Levitt could walk on a tightrope a few feet off the ground.
When it came time to shoot the climactic high-wire act, the production obviously didn’t want to suspend Gordon-Levitt thousands of feet in the air. So, he and his stunt double accomplished the tense, painful walk on a soundstage with a wire raised 12 feet off the ground. To add icing on the cake, though, Gordon-Levitt also learned to speak fluent French while he was balancing precariously on wires and even affected a specific Parisian accent. “I don’t know if I fooled French people,” he chuckled, “but I fooled Americans.”
Riz Ahmed learned American Sign Language and the drums in seven months
When Riz Ahmed signed up to play drummer Ruben Stone in Sound of Metal, a man who is losing his hearing and potentially his livelihood, he had two incredible skills he needed to master. He told Variety that director Darius Marder wanted the film to be as authentic as possible, which would involve his lead actor actually playing the drums on-screen.
However, because the character has to learn American Sign Language throughout the film, too, Ahmed could learn along with him. “By immersing myself in it,” Ahmed revealed, “when Ruben can be fluent in ASL, I’m able to try and get as close as possible to fluency myself.” To be as authentic as possible, Ahmed spent seven months with coach Jeremy Lee Stone learning ALS five days per week.
The star also immersed himself in the deaf community because, as Stone noted, “He wanted to go to deaf events, meet deaf people and take a raw and unfiltered look at the deaf community and tap into our world and our perspective.” To Ahmed, it was a matter of respect – he didn’t want to be a big-shot actor who disrespected Stone and his work by saying, “Teach me a couple of words in ASL.”
Rooney Mara became a computer hacker and a skateboarder
Signing up to play gothic hacker Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remake required Rooney Mara going through a physical transformation that included getting ear, nipple, and eyebrow piercings and losing a ton of weight. However, she was also sent on a couple of crash courses in an effort to authentically portray a few of Salander’s other skills including computer hacking, kickboxing, and skateboarding.
“I went into training,” the star told Variety. “I did skateboarding to sort of get the teenage boy walk and a lot of kickboxing. I started the dialect training right away and did some computer training.” This computer training – which she admitted wasn’t quite as extensive as she would have liked – entailed hacking and learning how to take apart a computer and put it back together again.
All things considered, inhabiting Salander’s uniquely antisocial habits in the film wasn’t a chore for Mara, who admitted she’s always been a loner anyway. In fact, she told Dazed magazine that she loves nothing more than sitting alone in her room, staring at a computer screen. “Yeah, I’m weird,” she chuckled. “But, like, everyone’s weird though, right?”
Margot Robbie spent three months learning how to ice skate
In order to portray disgraced Olympic ice skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, Margot Robbie worked with skating choreographer Sarah Kawahara five times per week for five months. The Australian star admitted that she was constantly terrified that she wasn’t going to be able to get good enough at the sport for the movie, and that the production would need to extensively use doubles and trickery.
However, practice makes perfect, as they say, and suddenly, everything just clicked into place. “We were just a few weeks from shooting, and I was still struggling to find my outside edges,” Robbie told THR. “I just thought I was never going to get them, and then, one day, it just clicked.” Kawahara was impressed by the actor’s dedication and refusal to give up, especially because she’d never skated before in her life.
Ultimately, Robbie was able to perform nearly all the skating in the movie except the more dangerous jumps, which were executed by doubles. However, all her hard work meant that the Barbie star perfectly replicated the first minute of Harding’s 1994 Olympic routine, and that footage made it into the film.
