These celebs have a gift for picking up languages. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Times Celebrities Learned a Language for a Role.
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00:00Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the Top 10 Times Celebrities
00:12Learned a Language for a Role For this list, we'll be looking at famous
00:24people who took on a foreign tongue to portray an on-screen character.
00:28They don't have to have mastered the language to qualify, but we think it's even cooler
00:32if they did.
00:33Which bi or multilingual badass is your favourite?
00:36Dictate in the comments below.
00:40It's always a tall order to act opposite Tom Hanks.
00:47Helena Tsengel did so at just 11 years old, and with a new arsenal of words under her
00:52belt.
00:53For her role as Joanna Leonberger in News of the World, the German actress learned the
01:04native language of the Oklahoman Kiowa people.
01:08Tsengel studied exhaustively with a tribe elder in order to deliver lines that were
01:12written almost entirely in tribal speech.
01:28She also gained knowledge of the people's physical mannerisms and culture, along with
01:33a heartwarming friendship with her teacher.
01:35Paul Greengrass' Weston received multiple accolades, including a Golden Globe nom for
01:41Tsengel's performance.
01:55She's also acquired an invaluable piece of history, as living persons who are fluent
01:59in Kiowa are an extreme rarity.
02:07If you're going to parlay with Chalamet, it might help if you're a touch bilingual.
02:12The heartthrob sensation was already a French speaker before he took on the role of Elio
02:17in Call Me By Your Name.
02:27While filming on location for Luca Guadagnino's drama, Chalamet immersed himself in the country
02:32and his character by learning piano, guitar and Italian.
02:36Though French is no easy language to conquer, the lingually experienced actor still struggled
02:42with the syntax of bel paese.
02:52He heavily anatomised the phrases, paying attention to grammar, conjugations and composition.
02:58The Academy graced Chalamet with a Best Actor nomination for his efforts.
03:03And we have to admit, listening to Italian roll off his tongue is pretty easy on the
03:07ears.
03:19Much like Quentin Tarantino needed Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Bastards, he never could
03:24have made Kill Bill without Uma Thurman.
03:35But embodying The Bride was even more challenging than finding the right wedding dress.
03:40Besides extensive martial arts and combat training, Thurman added Japanese to her roster
03:45of talents.
03:51Even before exercising her body, she was working out her mind through sessions with a Japanese
03:56instructor.
03:57She even had to deliver some dialogue in a medieval samurai speech, sort of like Old
04:02English for the Eastern Hemisphere.
04:09Her ability to do so helps give the on-screen persona a level of authenticity that's worthy
04:14of Hattori Hanzo.
04:20Being one of the most widely spoken languages, English is often a requirement to pass Hollywood
04:25Stardom 101.
04:26In the case of Spanish thespian Penelope Cruz, it was the screenplays that did the teaching.
04:39The young Spaniard got through early auditions with only simple phrases like, thank you and
04:43how are you.
04:44For her first American film, the 1998 Western The High Low Country, she began sounding out
04:50her non-native lines.
05:01Phonetic memorization eventually translated into textual understanding, and through this
05:06process she became an English speaker.
05:09She earned an ALMA Awards Best Actress nomination, despite delivering some dialogue that she
05:14did not fully comprehend.
05:31Cruz's career has been explosive in both tongues, and it's up to you to decide which one she
05:37can deliver sexier.
05:39For Leo DiCaprio, that answer includes getting inside dead animal bodies, eating actual bison
05:53liver, and learning Native American vernacular.
05:56The cast of Alejandro Inarritu's The Revenant, including both DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, collaborated
06:02meticulously with scholars of the indigenous Arikara and Pawnee languages.
06:15Leo displayed great natural talent for mimicking the sounds and speech patterns of the dialect,
06:20and he greatly served Inarritu's pursuit for cultural accuracy.
06:37His diligence not only earned the Golden Statue, but it helped present a scarcely precise and
06:43optimistic voice of a historically significant nation.
06:47Robert De Niro resonates Hollywood's visage of the Italian mob so well that those names
06:57are practically interchangeable.
07:03So it's surprising to learn that De Niro didn't grow up studying the Italian dictionary.
07:07It wasn't until he became young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II that he adopted colloquial
07:13In fact, he spent four months on Sicilian soil to help train his ear and observe the
07:25Don's motherland.
07:26De Niro's contribution to The Godfather legacy is a crowning Academy Award-winning achievement,
07:31certainly helped by his commitment to these origins.
07:42He once described Sicilians as having a way of watching without watching.
07:46We hope when they watch him in Part II that they are proud.
07:56Communication can be just as beautiful even if it's not spoken out loud.
08:00Even before the recent nominations and accolades for CODA, a little horror film called A Quiet
08:05Place had heavy appreciation for the art of sign.
08:14In a world amassed with acutely sound-sensitive aliens, knowing American Sign Language puts
08:19you ahead of the evolutionary curve.
08:21Director-slash-star John Krasinski insisted on casting a deaf actress for the role, and
08:26with Millicent Simmons booking the part of his daughter, he ensured that all cast and
08:30crew members learned ASL.
08:39Not only did this serve as a transformative acting experience, but also the collective
08:44understanding of an altered lifestyle influenced camera and editing techniques.
08:49Not only did this immersion elevate the movie's intensity, but it also respectfully saluted
08:54the deaf community and the uniqueness of survival with heightened senses as well.
09:08This handsome king of men is a true renaissance Dunedin.
09:13He's an actor, poet, painter, we could go on.
09:26And he can articulate several lingos.
09:29He grew up with Spanish, and has appropriated French, Danish, and Arabic to his repertoire
09:34for various roles.
09:35For Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mortensen confronted J.R.R.
09:40Tolkien's invented tongue of Elvish.
09:49Tolkien's crafted words can be as difficult as their real-world inspirations, but Vigo's
09:54multi-layered familiarity with languages helped him pick them up quickly.
09:59Listening to him, you'd believe that Elvish was just as real as English, French, or even
10:03Arabic, which he would later learn for the period drama Far From Men.
10:10So which language should he sing us to sleep in?
10:18Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Lady
10:21Michelle Yeoh is just all kinds of cool, from doing her own stunt work and action flicks,
10:26to a multi-layered ice queen in Crazy Rich Asians.
10:29This artiste of many talents commands every scene she's featured in.
10:33For Ang Lee's operatic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, she extended her vocabulary from English,
10:40Malay, and Cantonese to Mandarin.
10:55With the help of Mandarin-speaking crew and the patience of a disciplined warrior, she
11:00performed vocal acrobatics to phonetically piece together her lines and translations.
11:10She would later tackle Burmese in the 2011 biography The Lady.
11:14Not only did she dissect her dialogue's meaning, but also its appropriate moments of exclamatory
11:20emphasis and dramatic pause.
11:33If such conscientious care and focus sounds tedious, well, just watch the phenomenal end
11:39product.
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12:00Meryl Streep's talent is legendary, and it's particularly because of her inhuman ability
12:05to disappear into her characters.
12:08It's reasonable to think she considers the adoption of a new language just part of the
12:12job description.
12:28In this case, she learned two.
12:30To personify Zofia, or Sophie Zawistowski in Sophie's Choice, she began studying Polish
12:36to make sure that she got the accent right.
12:56When director Alan J. Pakula reportedly changed some of her lines to German and Polish impromptu,
13:02she secured knowledge of each to enhance veracity.
13:05Not only was this attempt for extra credit demanding, but she's admitted that it was
13:09a monumental new way to understand her character.
13:12Streep's dedication paid off, as Sophie's Choice is widely regarded as one of her greatest
13:17acting achievements.
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