5 Celebrities Who’ve Trained for Ballet

Ballet is a difficult discipline that demands dancers to spent hours daily perfecting not only their dancing skills, but also their bodies. It’s grueling training but these 5 celebrities have all done it. Some of these stars still keep training and say it’s an enjoyable but tough hobby, while others trained in their younger years in the hopes of becoming professionals. Some of these celebs had to play the role of a ballerina and put their bodies through rigorous training in order to look realistic on screen.

 

Elle Fanning 

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Elle trains regularly and admits it can be challenging: ”I go to ballet, like, five days a week and I love it so much, but that’s the hardest thing I’ll ever do in my life, no doubt. You’re good or bad, and that’s it. That would be hard to pursue as a career, but in my dream that would be the thing.”

Emily Blunt
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Emily played the role of a ballet dancer and says she worked very hard for the part:  “Every day I’m in dance boot camp. It’s a wonderful idea to have the girl be a dancer, but it’s very high maintenance. I’m really loving the challenge. I’m training with this amazing ballet company, and it’s been a real awakening for me when it comes to fitness. Everything hurts all the time.”

Mia Wasikowska
SFF 'Mystery Road' - Premiere

Mia trained for years to be a ballerina and quit before the age of 14: “Ballet had been so much about achieving physical perfection, and what I liked about film was that it was the opposite… I feel like the dance world was so hardcore in terms of image and body, and physicality, and I know that a lot of people find the film world similar, but I’ve found it so much more chilled out that I’m like ‘Meh! Whatever!’ Try experiencing prima ballerina land – it’s crazy.”

Natalie Portman
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Natalie had to transform in to a ballerina for ‘Black Swan’ and says it took hours of training a day to get her body in shape for the role: “We were doing, like, five hours a day of ballet training and swimming and toning just to get my body right and also start learning how to dance”.

Penelope Cruz
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Penelope trained as a ballet dancer in her younger years and says it taught her discipline: “If I hadn”t had the discipline of all those years in the dance world, it would have been much, much tougher. I mean, it goes too far sometimes. I mean, I used to take my toenails – they would die from dancing – so I would just take the whole toenail and throw it away, and not feel anything. “But I loved it.”