These Actors Didn't Fake The Music — They Actually Learned To Play It

Joaquin Phoenix Bought A Guitar And Just... Learned Johnny Cash From Scratch

Phoenix couldn't sing or play guitar when he signed on for Walk the Line, so director James Mangold's first note was simply: buy a guitar. From there Phoenix spent months in voice and guitar training with producer T-Bone Burnett, working through Cash's syncopated "freight-train" strum until it became second nature.

Jamie Foxx Was Already A Piano Prodigy — And Ray Charles Still Tested Him Personally

Foxx had trained on classical piano since childhood, but nailing Ray Charles's exact fingering meant, in his own words, "hours and hours and hours of not leaving the hotel with the piano, to make sure it was right." He even sat down to jam with Charles himself before filming, and famously hit a wrong note that got him a real-time lecture from the legend about patience.

Rami Malek Never Danced In His Life — Then Relearned Freddie Mercury's Entire Body

Malek's singing was blended with a Mercury soundalike, but the physical performance was all him, drilled for months with movement coach Polly Bennett, who built training around the fact that Mercury had been a boxer growing up and an excellent long distance runner, so Bennett could work with Rami to get him to run for a long time, box, and become limber and agile. She knew the work paid off the moment Malek performed the full 20-minute Live Aid set beat by beat without skipping a single gesture.

Austin Butler Spent A Year On His Voice Before Elvis Even Started Shooting

Long before cameras rolled, Butler put in a full year of dedicated vocal coaching and, according to his voice coach, approached the challenge with a deep dive into the specifics and mechanics of Elvis's voice, followed by a long period of integrating it. It worked almost too well — he sang every Elvis track live on set, and reportedly damaged his own vocal cords doing 40 takes of a single song.

Val Kilmer Learned 50 Doors Songs — The Band Couldn't Tell Him Apart From Jim Morrison

Kilmer spent six months rehearsing Doors songs every single day and, per the film's production history, learned 50 songs, 15 of which are actually performed in the film. He also logged countless hours with the band's real producer Paul Rothchild, who related anecdotes, stories, tragic moments and humorous moments about how Jim thought and interpreted his own lyrics — training so thorough that surviving Doors members reportedly couldn't distinguish Kilmer's vocals from Morrison's.