It’s been a long while since anyone caught a glimpse of the acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis. After he statement in 2017 that he would no longer pursue acting, prior to the release of Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis quietly faded from view. Yet, in his absence, his reputation has only grown.
The Mythos of His Method
Primarily, this reputation revolves around his preferred approach to roles. Being an actor known for disappears into the roles he plays – for example, while filming Lincoln, 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 texts to Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Was it accurate that he only eat animals he’d killed for Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on being spoon-fed for My Left Foot?
Extreme acting methods: have we lost interest with over-the-top performances?
Currently, Daniel Day-Lewis is back to public attention, with some hesitation, promoting his latest movie Anemone. And he is using this to vocalise his anger regarding how method acting is perceived. “I am somewhat annoyed these days to hear various individuals gobbling off and saying things like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which I think suggests that someone is behaving like a lunatic in an extreme fashion,” he stated to the New York Times. “People often concentrate on the less important details of the work, and those details always seem to involve some form of self-punishment or a situation that imposes upon oneself extreme unease or psychological strain. But of course, in the career of an actor, it must principally be about the internal work.”
A World of Imitators
To be honest, this sounds as if 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 among the best actors to ever work, and your approach includes striking a prop until you break your nose (for Gangs of New York) or enduring 48 hours in solitary confinement deprived of sustenance (for In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that fellow performers will want to fill that vacuum by imitating their idol.
Essentially, we exist in a landscape full of half-cocked Day-Lewis impersonators who strive only to demonstrate the sheer amount of effort they put into their roles. At the shallow end of the pool there are performers such as Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to earn an Academy Award for House of Gucci that she spent the entire promotion attempting to persuade people that she became functionally Italian over 18 months in preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who decided to deeply embed himself in the character of the Joker (for Suicide Squad) by sending “disturbing” gifts to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, range from dead pigs and rats to intimate objects and used condoms, though Leto denied those worst excesses. Then, naturally, we have Jim Carrey, who went so deep into Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded to get a full-length documentary out of B-roll of him causing difficulties to the utmost for his colleagues.
Contemporary Method Practitioners
The foremost Method Guy currently seems to be Jeremy Strong (once an assistant to Day-Lewis), whose process while filming Succession was so laboriously intensive that it became the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were either concerned about his conduct (“It’s the cost on himself that worries me,” said Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by his actions (“I recall him causing everyone else roll their eyes,” stated an anonymous cast member).
Daniel Day-Lewis claims he ‘did not plan to retire, truly’
We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield went celibate for six months for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio rested inside an animal carcass for The Revenant. It’s quite possible that actor Austin Butler continues to talk like Elvis Presley, three years after that film came out. All of this, to some extent, aims to evoke the dedication with which Day-Lewis takes his work.
A Noble But Uphill Fight
And, although his rebuttal to critics of the Method might be noble, a brief promotional cycle might not be enough to alter perceptions, let alone their practices. Maybe if he wants to remind people the true essence of the Method, or to demonstrate its potential results, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to simply begin producing more films. Surely we could all support that idea.
