Skyler Gisondo lied to Paul Thomas Anderson about piano skills

Skyler Gisondo has admitted he lied to Paul Thomas Anderson about being able to play the piano for the 2021 movie Licorice Pizza.

When the acclaimed filmmaker called to give him the role of actor Lance Brannigan in the coming-of-age movie, he asked if Gisondo could play the piano, and he lied "to the extreme" and assured him that he'd "been playing my entire life".

After the call, Gisondo looked up Scott Joplin's famous piano piece, The Entertainer, and was "terrified" at the prospect of learning it. However, he had 10 weeks before the shoot and decided he could master it if he dedicated enough time to it.

"I just thought like, 'This will be my full-time job; I have nothing else to do. If I have to play eight hours a day, I'll play.' I played legitimately probably like five hours a day every day," he shared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "The whole time, I kept waking up in cold sweats, like, 'Today's the day I call him and come clean and tell him I can't.' And then, like a week before, it was the first time I was like, 'I think I'm going to be able to do this.'"

The Superman star's dedication paid off as his piano scene went well on the day.

However, during post-production a couple of months later, the There Will Be Blood director informed him the scene had been cut.

"I was like, 'OK, right on, man,'" he recalled. "I was too scared to tell him. I never told him. I told his wife (Maya Rudolph) and she was like, 'You've got to tell him.' I was like, 'I'll never tell.'"

Licorice Pizza starred Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in their film debuts.

Gisondo, 30, is currently promoting the psychological thriller Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson, which is in U.S. cinemas now.