10 Insane Skills Actors Learned For Movie Roles

3. Ruth Wilson Learned How To Castrate Lambs (Dark River)

Ruth Wilson Dark River
Arrow Films

While preparing to play a farmer in the bleak 2017 drama Dark River, lead actress Ruth Wilson did the obvious thing: she went to work on a farm in order to gain some experience in that field. But as you might expect, this wasn't a walk in the park.

Spending around a month working on a farm in Yorkshire, Wilson - who, at first, was a complete noob at this sort of thing - was taught a bunch of different skills that made her feel more like her character.

These included shearing sheep, clipping hooves, and - in her own words - "castrating lambs". Yes, really.

Wilson found working with the animals to be incredibly difficult, but since her character is meant to be an expert in this area, she felt that it was important to get a taste of what it's like to work on a real farm.

Her work ethic is admirable, but perhaps she went a bit too "method" with that whole castrating thing.

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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!