Ben Affleck, Timothee Chalamet and More Stars Who Are Multilingual

Don’t speak English? These multilingual celebs might be able to help!

Jodie Foster

In her current film, A Private Life, the 63-year-old plays an American psychoanalyst living in Paris — and her performance is almost entirely in French. When she was a kid, her Francophile mom enrolled the actress in a French lycée in L.A. where every subject — even math and history — was conducted in the language. Her costar Noam Morgensztern was impressed, per The New York Times. “Her French is so incredible, I sometimes forgot that she wasn’t French!”

Colin Firth

Well, it is a romance language! The 65-year-old — whose Love Actually character famously learned Portuguese to woo his housekeeper — picked up Italian when he fell in love with Roman activist Livia Giuggioli, 56, in the 1990s (they divorced in 2021). Though he is fluent, Colin joked on The Jonathan Ross Show that her family never quite understood what he was talking about. “My Italian gets translated into Italian by an intermediary!”

Gwyneth Paltrow

She’s a triple threat! The Goop founder speaks French and Italian but truly loves Spanish. “When I was 15, I went to a small town outside Talavera de la Reina, and I had the most wonderful experience,” she’s said. “It really changed my life.” The 53-year-old has such fondness for the country, she teamed up with chef Mario Batali for the series Spain…on the Road Again, in which they sampled the foods of Spain.

Ben Affleck

The 53-year-old gets to show off his grip on Spanish as a Miami narcotics officer in his new action flick The Rip. His introduction to the language came when he was a child actor. “I did this, like, little kids TV series when I was 13, and the series that year was in Mexico,” Ben explained on The Kelly Clarkson Show of his time on PBS’ The Voyage of the Mimi. “So I was in Mexico that year, and that’s how I picked it up.”

Timothée Chalamet

The Marty Supreme actor was born to speak French — his dad was born in Nîmes and the 30-year-old spent summers visiting his grandparents in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, southwest of Lyon. While he’s impressed fans with his fluency on French chat shows, he’s modest about his skills. “Let’s say I’m about 97 percent [fluent],” he said on The Graham Norton Show. “I always like, you know, give myself a, like, stop-gap because it’s not perfect.”