There’s no escaping the current topic du jour in Hollywood: method acting. Suddenly, everyone and their mother has an opinion on whether going to such lengths as depriving yourself of sleep for the duration of a film shoot makes you an especially serious actor or just a cranky asshole.
The recent conversation around method acting—and more broadly, the lengths to which it is appropriate for an actor to go in pursuit of a great performance (or, if you’re cynical, awards recognition)—can be traced to last December, when The New Yorker published an excellent profile of Succession star Jeremy Strong. The piece, written by Michael Schulman, portrays Strong as a singular talent with such an intense devotion to his craft that it prompts concern from his co-stars and makes him difficult to work with. In the pull-quote beneath the article’s headline, Strong says of his character, Kendall Roy, “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.”
The article sparked fervorous discussion online about Strong’s approach to his job. (It also, bizarrely, prompted celebrities to rush to his defense as if he were the victim of a hate crime and not the subject of a fair, nuanced magazine profile.) In particular, people highlighted the comments of Strong’s co-star, the classically trained Shakespearean actor Brian Cox. “Actors are funny creatures,” Cox said in the piece. “I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
The debate around method acting also cropped up last month around the release of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, when Paul Dano, who plays the Riddler, made headlines for carrying on the grand tradition of actors who play Batman villains doing the absolute most to prepare for their roles.
And that brings us to the Jared Leto of it all. Leto is widely considered the most infamous example of modern method acting. Not only does he take being a dick way too far (like sending his co-stars rats and used condoms, for example), but his movies are never…well…good. Take his recent Sony Marvel film Morbius, for which he claimed to have used a wheelchair to go to the bathroom like his sickly character. It holds an embarrassing 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which begs the question: Does method acting even work?
In the convoluted mess of cultural commentary, the actual definition of the phrase “method acting” has become wildly distorted, as so often tends to be the case. It’s become one of those buzzword terms, like “gaslighting” and “parasocial relationships,” that’s thrown around on Twitter so lazily that it practically loses all meaning.
Method acting, or the Method, refers to a catalog of techniques developed by Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski. As refined by American actor Lee Strasberg, method acting calls on an actor to channel his or her own memories, experiences, and emotions in order to get closer to their characters. The goal is to bridge the emotional divide between actor and character so the performer is able to feel what the character feels on an innate level. Method acting is not, however, literally living as one’s character 24/7, on set and off, which early teachers of the technique understood to be psychologically harmful.
And yet, this is often what comes to mind when we think of the Method. We think of Daniel Day Lewis—undeniably a great actor—shunning Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of Gangs of New York, taking up dressmaking to play Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread, and demanding that the crew of Lincoln call him “Mr. President.” We think of Lady Gaga’s entire House of Gucci press tour, which revolved around the absurd measures she took to get into character as Patrizia Reggiani, including hiring an on-set psychiatric nurse and speaking in her awful “it’s-a-me, Mario” Italian accent for a year and a half.
Now, a high-profile actor can’t do an interview without being asked about their view on “method acting.” When interviewed for the Jeremy Strong New Yorker profile, Cox invoked a famous Hollywood anecdote in which Dustin Hoffman arrived on the set of Marathon Man in 1976 after going on a three-day bender so he would look disheveled for a particular scene. Hoffman’s co-star, the legendary stage actor Laurence Olivier, is said to have asked him, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”
Meanwhile, just last week, Fantastic Beasts actor Mads Mikkelsen went on a savage, no-holds-barred rant in GQ UK, calling method acting “pretentious.” He went on, “It’s bullshit. But preparation, you can take into insanity. What if it’s a shit film—what do you think you achieved? Am I impressed that you didn’t drop character? You should have dropped it from the beginning! How do you prepare for a serial killer? You gonna spend two years checking it out?” While he may not have been directly referring to Leto, his words are certainly applicable to Morbius’ epic flop. Mikkelsen went on to blame the media for praising such behavior, saying, “The media goes, ‘Oh my god, he took it so seriously, therefore he must be fantastic; let’s give him an award.’ Then that’s the talk, and everybody knows about it, and it becomes a thing.”
This week alone, two major actors offered their take on the over-the-top techniques of their method-loving industry peers. In a podcast interview on Friday, Pam & Tommy’s Sebastian Stan said, “I don’t believe in creating chaos for the purposes of acting. It just reads like an irresponsible, narcissistic thing. It reads like, ‘I’m afraid, and I want to torture everyone else because of it.” And on Thursday, Jon Bernthal, star of HBO’s upcoming crime drama We Own This City, told The Hollywood Reporter that he believes the word “method” has been greatly abused.
“Having studied in Moscow at the Moscow Art Theater, I guarantee you that making everybody call you by your character name and not showering for eight months was not what Stanislavski had in mind with the Method,” he said. But while Bernthal doesn’t see the benefit in making the crew call him by his character’s name off camera, he does try to stay mentally “in proximity” to the role.
It seems to have become something of a trend to condemn the once-revered technique, as if doing so proves that you are a really nice guy, actually. But before Cox and Mikkelsen, before Stan and Bernthal, Robert Pattinson was calling out practitioners of method acting for being assholes all the way back in 2019.
“I always say about people who do method acting, you only ever see people do the method when they’re playing an asshole,” Pattinson said at the time during an interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. “You never see someone being lovely to everyone while they’re really deep in character.”
Of course, for online discourse to truly be put to rest, we must end up exactly where we started. So by that logic, we are probably a week away from an impassioned Notes app essay from, like, Adrien Brody in defense of mailing live vermin via UPS for the sake of art. The discourse is surely far from over.
