Skills. We all need them. But at some point, we have to learn them. Enter the Skill Artist. Below, you’ll find 11 movies or TV shows featuring a character who teaches him or herself a skill and uses it on camera. I chose the character based on a few criteria.
First, the character learns a skill DIY style either by teaching himself or through non-traditional means. Second, the character either learns the skill or explains how they learned the skill onscreen. Third, the character must apply the skill to achieve a goal. I gave extra points to characters who fake it til they make it, learn multiple skills, or depend on a skill for life or death.
11. Eddie Mora (Bradley Cooper in Limitless) – Overcomes writer’s block and teaches himself to dominate the Stock Market.
Bradley Cooper’s character is a pathetic writer guy with chronic writer’s block until he accidentally takes a super pill that catapults him into super-intelligence. With this wonderdrug, he becomes a bestselling writer and learns to command the Stock Market. At the end of the movie, he’s rich, famous, and pretty much all powerful. Even though I loved watching a writer become rich and famous, he kinda cheats. For that, I docked points. But still, at least he learned something new on his own.
10. Django – Teaches himself Bounty Hunting Skills
Django starts out a slave, but is rescued by a benevolent bounty hunter, who eventually teaches him how to shoot a pistol and collect bounties. I don’t think I’m giving any spoilers away when I say that Django uses his shooting skills to take down the captors of his wife in a gloriously violent and awesome fashion.
9. Eliza Doolittle – Teaches herself to Speak Proper
In this classic movie, Audrey Hepburn’s character is a guttersnipe with poor elocution and grammar skills. A linguist makes a bet with a colleague that he can teach her to speak like a person from high society. Eliza makes her place in the list because the linguist’s colleague is convinced she can’t do it, but she does. Despite the extreme difficulty of her learning it, she does and eshe proves it when our linguist presents her at a high society ball and no one can tell she’s from the streets.
8. Hiccup – Teaches himself to ride a dragon.
My brother made me watch this movie when he was like 10. At first, I said, “no way, I don’t watch kid movies.” But he put it on anyway, and I’m glad he did because this is one of my favorite movies now. Hiccup starts out as a scrawny dweeb in a Viking society whose raison de vivre is killing dragons. When Hiccup accidentally takes a dragon down instead of killing it, he discovers that dragons are not the evil creatures the Vikings thought they were, he befriends the dragon named Toothless and his controversial efforts result in a big change for his entire society.
7. Hanna – Teaches herself to be an assassin.
In the first scene, Hanna, a 14-year-old girl, shoots a deer with a bow and arrow in the remote, snow-laden wilderness. She bends down to gut it when we hear a man’s disembodied voice:
Erik: Your dead. Right now. I’ve killed you.
[And later]
Erik: What’s wrong? Are you hurt? You were half asleep. You must always be ready. Even when you’re sleeping, think on your feet. Adapt…
Hanna: …or die. I’ll do better next time.
The first lines of dialogue in the movie are telling. She’s a spy-assassin in training by her father Eric. We can tell that they’ve had no interaction with outside world. Later, we see Erik reading her passages from an encyclopedia. This is her education. And if that’s not DIY, I don’t know what is! After her father is killed, Hanna spends the rest of the movie pretending to be a normal 14-year-old and using her assassin skills to hunt down the woman who killed her parents.
6. Paul – Teaches himself charm
Paul is a Con-artist who convinces a wealthy couple that he knows their son, who is a student at Harvard. Impressed by his charm, culinary skill, and vast knowledge of literature, the family boards him in their house and lends him large sums of money only to find out that he’s not who he says he is.
5. Will – Gives himself an Ivy League education in Good Will Hunting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebmlEGIAD78
While I typically think of a Skill Artist as one who learns more real-world skills, Will in Good Will Hunting gives himself a what would be a formal education in History, Literature and Mathematics. In the end, his mentor arranges for job interviews but Will chooses not to take them and leave with his girlfriend. Well, at least he didn’t take a traditional job!
4. Macgyver – Teaches himself how to use household products to foil bad guys.
MacGyver is the original Do-it-Yourselfer. If you’ve never seen MacGyver, he uses random household objects to solve crimes and defeat bad guys. In one episode disarms a rocket with a paperclip, in another episode he takes out machine gun wielding enemies with a blowgun he fashions from thorns. While he’s not necessarily learning skills onscreen, I’m pretty sure there’s no school of using random supplies to beat bad guys.
3. Walter White – Teaches himself to cook meth
Walter White is one of the greatest Skill Artists I can think of. Walter White teaches himself to cook meth and turn it into the biggest meth business in the southwest. It’s not necessarily the amount of skills that Walter teaches himself, it’s his persistence in the face of death, the death of his family, and the death of his neighbors. He never gives up. No matter how grim things look. While I don’t recommend risking your life or your family’s life to learn a skill, Walter White’s persistence is, perhaps, something to be commended.
2. Frank Abagnale – Teaches himself law, medicine, and pilot skills.
Frank Abagnale is one of the most impressive Skill Artists because he’s one of the only characters who is a real life person. And he didn’t just do it once, he impersonated a Pilot, Lawyer, and a doctor and created many successful bank checks. Frank Abagnale is number two it is clear due to the repeatability of his method, that he didn’t just learn a Skill, he had a successful system for teaching skills to himself.
1. Neal Caffrey – Teaches himself painting, sculpture, forgery, art history, sales, and more.
Neal Caffrey truly puts the artist in Skill Artist. In White Collar, he is a convicted felon who is allowed out of jail only to help the FBI solve white collar crimes. Each episode involves Neal employing a different skill to infiltrate a criminal network. In one episode he learns Pai Gow so he can infiltrate an underground gambling ring. In other episodes he paints indistinguishable replicas of famous paintings that he passes off to museum curators as real. There is no limit to this character’s skills. Of course, he has an unfair advantage over Frank Abagnale due to the fact that he’s a fictional character. But hey, no one said the artist couldn’t be fictional.
Is this list accurate? Can you think of anyone else who learns a skill onscreen? Let us know in the comments below.
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