15 Famous Actors Who Tricked You Into Thinking They Really Sang In Movies
This changes everything.
We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the tricks and lies their favorite actors pulled on them. Here are the musical dupes you probably fell for.
1. Rami Malek won the Best Actor Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, but the singing in the movie was mostly just old tapes of Freddie Mercury.
Malek spent countless hours prepping for the role, mimicking Mercury's moves and speaking with a fake overbite, but according to Rolling Stone magazine, "One thing he couldn’t re-create was Mercury’s singing voice. Most singing scenes in the movie rely on either vocal stems from Queen master tapes or new recordings by Marc Martel, a Canadian Christian rock singer whose voice is practically identical to the late frontman’s."
2. Even though Jennifer Lopez had to sing in her audition for Selena, they didn't end up using her real voice in the movie.
They used Selena Quintanilla's actual singing voice for the movie, and Jennifer Lopez just lip-synched.
3. Marion Cotillard took singing lessons for her role as Édith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, even though she lip-synched in the movie.
Cotillard said she spent more than six months in this role, and the hardest part was learning how to sing like Piaf because it was so technical. It ultimately won her the Best Actress Oscar in 2008.
5. The producers and directors of O Brother, Where Art Thou? assumed George Clooney would be a good singer because his aunt was the legendary Rosemary Clooney. They had him record one song and immediately realized they needed to hire someone else to provide the vocals.
Clooney knew he wasn't the best singer, so he decided to have some fun with the producers: "They played it back and were hoping that if I heard it, I'd know it was terrible. It sounded like a cat being run over by a semi, but I wanted them to suffer a little more, so I said it was great." Clooney ultimately told them he was fine with lip-synching, so they hired Dan Tyminski to provide his character's vocals.
6. Even though Hilary Duff played both Lizzie and Isabella in The Lizzie McGuire Movie, she didn't sing both parts. Her sister, Haylie, actually provided the singing voice for Isabella.
Haylie also guest-starred in a few episodes of Lizzie McGuire on the Disney Channel. She played Kate Sanders' equally mean cousin Amy.
—Tayla Leigh Sargent, Facebook
7. Christopher Plummer only sang tiny bits of each song in The Sound of Music. They dubbed most of his singing with the voice of Bill Lee.
Plummer went into detail about the whole dubbing process on The Sound of Music: "It was very well done. The entrances and exits from the songs were my voice, and then they filled in — in those days, they were very fussy about matching voices in musicals."
Lee was an actor himself, voicing and singing for characters in more than a dozen Disney films, like Cinderella, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book.
8. Wendy Makkena, who played Sister Mary Robert in the Sister Act movies, lip-synched all of her character's singing.
Andrea Robinson provided the singing voice for both Sister Act movies. She also sang "Athena's Song" in The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning.
9. Jonathan Taylor Thomas provided the speaking voice for Young Simba in The Lion King, but Jason Weaver provided the singing voice.
You probably know Weaver best as Marcus Henderson in Smart Guy or as Michael Jackson in The Jacksons: An American Dream, but in the early '90s he was the uncredited singing voice for Young Simba.
Weaver revealed that Disney originally offered him $2 million to supply Young Simba's singing voice, but his mother knew the power of Disney and insisted on a royalties deal. They settled on $100,000 plus royalties, and over time he's made back well more than that initial $2 million.
10. And even though Matthew Broderick recorded two songs as Simba, the vocals were ultimately provided by Joseph Williams, whom you might recognize as the lead singer of Toto.
Williams, who was the lead singer of Toto from 1986 to 1988 and from 2010 to 2019, worked on the soundtracks for dozens of movies, ranging from Pitch Perfect to The Goonies to Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi. For The Lion King, he sang as Simba on "Hakuna Matata" and "Can You Feel the Love Tonight."
11. Rebecca Ferguson wasn't actually the one who made you cry during Jenny Lind's "Never Enough" ballad in The Greatest Showman.
Loren Allred, whom you might recognize as a contestant on The Voice in the US in 2012, actually provided the character's vocals for the film.
12. Audrey Hepburn didn't really sing in My Fair Lady. The real vocals were supplied by Marni Nixon.
Nixon started as a messenger girl at MGM. They wanted to groom her to become a star, but after they heard her singing voice, she became a "ghost" (basically anyone who did uncredited voice work for studios).
Her singing voice was used for Eliza Doolittle onscreen, and in 1964 she even played Doolittle herself in New York during the show's revival. She was a true legend and provided the vocals for several iconic movies, including Cinderella, The Sound of Music (she played Sister Sophia), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (singing for Marilyn Monroe), and even Mulan.
13. Nixon also sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, a fact that had to be kept a secret. The movie's soundtrack sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but Nixon received only $420 for her work.
Nixon was ultimately threatened by Twentieth Century Fox to keep quiet about her voiceover work: “You always had to sign a contract that nothing would be revealed. ... They said, 'If anybody ever knows that you did any part of the dubbing for Deborah Kerr, we’ll see to it that you don’t work in town again.' Could you imagine? I was scared to death.”
14. And Nixon also sang for Natalie Wood in West Side Story, which was a shock to Wood because she'd already filmed everything.
After Wood filmed her part, the studio said that her voice wasn't good enough and it would be replaced (Wood apparently stormed out of the studio, fuming). As a result, instead of having the actor mimic the prerecorded singing voice, the roles were reversed: "I had to try to match her breath and pronunciation and the sound of her voice."
West Side Story went on to win Best Picture, along with nine other Oscars, in 1962. This was the first time Nixon felt like she deserved proper credit for her invisible labor: “The anonymity didn’t bother me until I sang Natalie Wood’s songs in West Side Story. Then I saw how important my singing was to the picture. I was giving my talent, and somebody else was taking the credit.” Soon after, it became customary for ghost singers to receive credit and royalties for their work.
15. And, of course, Zac Efron's singing voice wasn't really used in the first High School Musical movie. That was provided by Drew Seeley.
Efron revealed that he was kind of blindsided when he found out that his voice wasn't featured: "In the first movie, after everything was recorded, my voice was not on them. I was not really given an explanation. It just kind of happened that way." He ultimately pushed to have his singing voice featured in the two sequels, and it was.