It’s been a long while since anyone saw or heard from Daniel Day-Lewis. After he statement in 2017 declaring he would cease to work as an actor, just before the release of Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis quietly faded from view. Yet, in his absence, his reputation has only grown.
The Legend of His Acting Method
Largely, this legend centers on his favored approach to roles. Being an actor who famously disappears into his characters – for instance, while filming Lincoln, reportedly asked the director address him as “Mr. President” throughout the shoot – the world has become increasingly obsessed with how he works. Did he really send texts to Sally Field in character as Lincoln? Was it accurate that he consumed solely animals he’d killed for The Last of the Mohicans? And did he insist on receiving food via spoon while filming My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: have we lost interest with over-the-top performances?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis has returned to public attention, with some hesitation, promoting his latest movie Anemone. He is using this to express his frustration regarding how method acting is perceived. “I’m a little cross nowadays to hear various individuals gobbling off and using phrases like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which seems is meant to imply that a person’s 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 typically include some sort of self-punishment or an experience that imposes upon oneself a severe discomfort or mental instability. However, in the life of an actor, it must principally be about the inner transformation.”
An Industry of Imitators
To be honest, it appears as if Day-Lewis has come out from his retreat only to discover shocked by the world that has been created mirroring his methods. If you’re widely considered among the best performers in history, and your approach involves headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (for Gangs of New York) or enduring two days in solitary confinement deprived of sustenance (during In the Name of the Father), it’s natural that fellow performers will attempt to fill that vacuum by trying to mimic your hero.
Essentially, we now live in an environment populated by half-cocked Day-Lewis impersonators who want nothing more than to demonstrate the extensive degree of effort they put into a character. On the milder side of this trend we have people like Lady Gaga, who was determined to win an Oscar for House of Gucci that she dedicated the entire promotion attempting to persuade people that she transformed into functionally Italian over 18 months in preparation.
Additionally, there is Jared Leto, who chose to immerse himself in the character of the Joker (in Suicide Squad) through sending “disturbing” gifts to fellow cast members. These items, depending on who you ask, range from dead pigs and rats to anal beads and used condoms, though Leto denied those worst excesses. Then, naturally, there is Jim Carrey, who immersed himself so fully into Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers literally managed to get a feature-length documentary out of B-roll of him making life as impossible as he could for everyone around him.
Contemporary Method Practitioners
The foremost Method Guy currently seems to be Jeremy Strong (once an assistant to Day-Lewis), whose approach while filming Succession was so laboriously intensive that it became the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, including statements from individuals who were worried about his conduct (“It’s the cost to himself concerns me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by it (“I remember [him] making others roll their eyes,” stated an anonymous cast member).
The actor claims he ‘never intended to retire, truly’
We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex over half a year for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio rested inside a dead animal during The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that Austin Butler continues to talk like Elvis Presley, years following the movie’s release. Each of these instances, in part, is meant to invoke the seriousness with which Day-Lewis approaches his craft.
A Noble Yet Challenging Fight
Moreover, while his fightback to critics of the Method might be noble, a brief promotional cycle may prove insufficient to change anyone’s mind, let alone their practices. Maybe if he wishes to make audiences recall the true essence of the Method, or to demonstrate what it can achieve, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to simply begin producing more films. Surely we could all get behind that.
