10 Insane Skills Actors Learned For Movie Roles

9. Sigourney Weaver Learned How To Communicate With Gorillas (Gorillas In The Mist)

Sigourney Weaver Gorillas In The Mist
Universal Pictures

Sigourney Weaver is most famous for sci-fi blockbuster fare like Alien, Ghostbusters, and Avatar, but away from all that fantastical stuff, she made a grounded and touching little movie called Gorillas In The Mist in 1988, which was a difficult project to shoot.

The film centres around a mountain gorilla expert called Dian Fossey (Weaver), a character who the filmmakers strove to portray as authentically as possible.

This meant working with actual gorillas, and on top of that, it also meant getting Weaver in shots with them, which forced the actress to learn how to communicate with these gorillas, mainly so they would feel comfortable around her.

And so, that's just what Weaver did. According to The New York Times, she learned various body gestures and "the rolling belches of ape-speak", in an effort to capture the real-life Fossey's intimate bond with her gorilla friends.

In the end, Weaver's hard work paid off: she became comfortable around the gorillas and they became comfortable around her, and her performance was so effective that it was even nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!