It has been quite some time since the public caught a glimpse of Daniel Day-Lewis. After he statement in 2017 that he would no longer work as an actor, prior to the debut of The Phantom Thread, the actor withdrew from the spotlight. Yet, during his hiatus, his legend expanded further.
The Legend of His Acting Method
Primarily, this reputation revolves around his favored style of working. As someone known for disappears into his characters – for instance, during the Lincoln biopic, reportedly asked Steven Spielberg address him as “Mr. President” throughout the shoot – audiences has grown increasingly obsessed with how he works. Did he really send messages to co-star Sally Field in character as Lincoln? Did he consumed solely animals he’d killed for The Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on receiving food via spoon for My Left Foot?
Extreme acting methods: have we lost interest with actorly excess?
Now, Day-Lewis is back to public attention, somewhat reluctantly, for his new film Anemone. And he is using this to express his anger at how method acting is perceived. “I’m a little cross these days when I hear various individuals talking carelessly and saying things like ‘gone full method’, which I think is meant to imply that a person’s behaving like a lunatic in an extreme fashion,” he told the New York Times. “People tends to focus on the less important details of the work, and those details always seem to involve some form of self-flagellation or a situation that causes extreme unease or psychological strain. However, in the life of an actor, it has to principally be about the internal work.”
An Industry of Imitators
Frankly, this sounds like the actor has come out from seclusion only to discover aghast at the acting community that has been created mirroring his methods. When you are widely considered one of the greatest actors to ever work, and your process involves headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (for Gangs of New York) or spending two days in isolation deprived of sustenance (during In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that other actors will want to fill that vacuum by trying to mimic your hero.
Essentially, we now live in an environment full of imperfect imitators of Day-Lewis who want nothing more than to show the world the sheer amount of effort they put into a character. At the shallow end of this trend there are performers such as Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to earn an Academy Award for House of Gucci that she spent the whole campaign attempting to persuade people that she transformed into an Italian native over 18 months as preparation.
Additionally, there is Jared Leto, who chose to deeply embed himself into the role as the Joker (in Suicide Squad) through sending “horrifying” presents to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, included deceased animals to intimate objects and used condoms, though the actor refuted the most extreme claims. And then, of course, there is Jim Carrey, who went so deep into Andy Kaufman for Man on the Moon that they literally managed to get a full-length documentary out of B-roll of him causing difficulties as impossible as he could for everyone around him.
Contemporary Followers of the Method
The main practitioner of the Method at the moment seems to be Jeremy Strong (once an assistant to Day-Lewis), whose process during Succession was so laboriously intensive that it became the subject of a critical New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were worried for his behaviour (“It’s the cost on himself that worries me,” remarked co-star Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by it (“I remember [him] making everyone else to react with exasperation,” stated an unnamed co-star).
Daniel Day-Lewis claims he ‘never intended to stop acting, really’
There are numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex for six months while preparing for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in a dead animal during The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that Austin Butler still speaks like Elvis Presley, three years after the movie’s release. All of this, in part, aims to evoke the dedication with which Day-Lewis takes his work.
A Noble But Uphill Battle
Moreover, while his fightback to critics of the Method might be noble, a short publicity tour might not be enough to alter perceptions, let alone their practices. Perhaps if he wants to remind people what method acting is, or to show them its potential results, then the optimal strategy for Day-Lewis is to simply begin producing more films. Certainly everyone would get behind that.
