5 Actors Who Basically Earned A Second Degree Just To Film ONE Scene

Natalie Portman Trained Like An Olympic Ballerina — For Over A YEAR

Natalie Portman didn't just take a few dance classes for Black Swan, she spent roughly a year building an entire dancer's body from scratch with former New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers. By the end she was doing hours of ballet, swimming a mile, and toning daily, and she still lost her toenails and dislocated a rib along the way.

Rami Malek Had Never Touched A Piano — Then Learned To Play It UPSIDE DOWN

Rami Malek said flatly that before Bohemian Rhapsody, he'd "never played a piano, never touched a piano," yet he still had to learn guitar and piano cues, including a scene where Freddie Mercury famously plays the keys upside down. His days on set were basically music school: hours of singing, piano, and movement training just to fake it convincingly for the camera.

Margot Robbie Lived At The Rink For Five Months To Become Tonya Harding

Margot Robbie couldn't ice skate at all before I, Tonya, so she trained roughly four to five months, four hours a day, five days a week, with skating choreographer Sarah Kawahara, working straight through her own wedding week. She got good enough that Kawahara had her perform the first minute of Tonya Harding's actual 1994 Olympic routine on screen herself.

Joaquin Phoenix Built The Joker's Creepy Dance From A 1930s Vaudeville Clip

For Joker, Joaquin Phoenix worked with choreographer Michael Arnold and then went down a YouTube rabbit hole of old performance footage, landing on 1930s dancer Ray Bolger's "Old Soft Shoe" number as the key inspiration. He said he basically stole Bolger's odd, arrogant chin-up move wholesale, and it became one of the character's most iconic physical tics.

Timothée Chalamet Spent FIVE YEARS Learning To Play Bob Dylan's Harmonica

Long before A Complete Unknown even started filming, Timothée Chalamet worked with harmonica coach Rob Paparozzi for five years, eventually mastering 13 Dylan songs on guitar, piano, and harmonica at the same time. He performed every single song live on camera instead of lip-syncing, and even took a solo "spirit-gathering" road trip retracing Dylan's path from Minnesota to Greenwich Village to prep.