It’s been a long while since anyone caught a glimpse of the acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Following his announcement in 2017 declaring he would cease to work as an actor, just before the debut of The Phantom Thread, the actor withdrew from the spotlight. However, during his hiatus, his legend expanded further.
The Mythos of His Acting Method
Primarily, this legend centers on his preferred approach to roles. As someone who famously disappears into his characters – for example, while filming Lincoln, he had Steven Spielberg address him as “Mr President” throughout the shoot – audiences has become increasingly obsessed with his process. Did he really send messages to co-star Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Was it accurate that he consumed solely animals he’d killed during The Last of the Mohicans? And did he insist on being spoon-fed for My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: has the public fallen out of love with actorly excess?
Currently, Day-Lewis has returned 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 viewed. “I’m a little cross these days to hear various individuals talking carelessly and saying things like ‘gone full method’, which I think is meant to imply that a person’s acting insane in an extreme fashion,” he told a major publication. “People tends to focus on superficial aspects of acting, and those details always seem to involve some sort of self-flagellation or a situation that causes extreme unease or mental instability. But of course, in the life of an actor, it has to principally be about the inner transformation.”
A World Full of Followers
Frankly, this sounds like the actor has emerged from seclusion and found himself aghast at the world that has developed mirroring his methods. When you are widely considered one of the greatest actors in history, and your process includes headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (for Gangs of New York) or spending two days in isolation without food or water (for In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that other actors will attempt to emulate that example by imitating your hero.
In other words, we now live in an environment populated by imperfect imitators of Day-Lewis who want nothing more than to demonstrate the extensive degree of dedication they invest in a character. At the shallow end of this trend there are performers such as Lady Gaga, who was determined to earn an Academy Award for House of Gucci that she spent the whole campaign trying to convince everyone that she became an Italian native for a year and a half in preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who decided to immerse himself in the character as the Joker (for Suicide Squad) by sending “disturbing” gifts to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, included deceased animals to anal beads and used condoms, though Leto denied those worst excesses. Then, of course, we have Jim Carrey, who immersed himself so fully into Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that they succeeded in creating a feature-length documentary out of B-roll of him causing difficulties as impossible as he could for his colleagues.
The Modern Method Practitioners
The foremost practitioner of the Method at the moment seems to be Jeremy Strong (once Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process while filming Succession was so rigorously detailed that it became the basis of a derisive magazine feature, full of quotes from people who were worried for his behaviour (“The toll to himself that worries me,” said Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by it (“I remember [him] making everyone else roll their eyes,” stated an unnamed co-star).
Daniel Day-Lewis claims he ‘never intended to stop acting, truly’
There are so many other examples. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex for six months for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio rested inside an animal carcass during The Revenant. It’s quite possible that Austin Butler still speaks in the style of Elvis, three years after that film came out. Each of these instances, to some extent, aims to evoke the seriousness in which Day-Lewis takes his work.
A Noble Yet Challenging Fight
Moreover, although his rebuttal against method detractors might be noble, a brief promotional cycle may prove insufficient to change anyone’s mind, let alone their practices. Maybe if he wants to remind people the true essence of the Method, or to show them what it can achieve, then the optimal strategy for Day-Lewis is to just begin producing more films. Surely we could all get behind that.
