It’s been quite some time since the public caught a glimpse of Daniel Day-Lewis. After he statement in 2017 declaring he would cease to pursue acting, prior to the release of Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis quietly faded from view. Yet, during his hiatus, his reputation has only grown.
The Legend of His Acting Method
Largely, this reputation centers on his favored style of working. As someone who famously disappears into the roles he plays – for instance, during the Lincoln biopic, he had Steven Spielberg call him “Mr President” throughout the shoot – audiences has grown more fascinated with his process. Did he really send messages to co-star Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Was it accurate that he only eat animals he’d killed during Last of the Mohicans? And did he insist on being spoon-fed for My Left Foot?
Extreme acting methods: have we lost interest with over-the-top performances?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis has returned to public attention, somewhat reluctantly, promoting his latest movie Anemone. He is using this to vocalise his anger regarding how method acting is perceived. “I am somewhat annoyed these days when I hear various individuals gobbling off and saying things like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which seems is meant to imply that someone is behaving like a lunatic in a drastic way,” he told the New York Times. “People tends to focus on the less important aspects of acting, and those details typically include some form of self-punishment or a situation that imposes upon oneself extreme unease or mental instability. However, in the career for a performer, it must mainly focus on the inner transformation.”
An Industry Full of Followers
Frankly, this sounds like Day-Lewis has emerged from his retreat and found himself shocked by the acting community that has been created mirroring his methods. If you’re widely considered one of the greatest performers to ever work, and your approach involves headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (in Gangs of New York) or spending two days in isolation without food or water (for In the Name of the Father), it’s natural that fellow performers will want to emulate that example by trying to mimic their idol.
In other words, we exist in a landscape populated by imperfect Day-Lewis impersonators who strive only to demonstrate the extensive degree of effort they put into a character. At the shallow end of the pool there are performers such as Lady Gaga, who was determined to win an Oscar with House of Gucci that she spent the entire promotion trying to convince everyone that she became functionally Italian over 18 months as preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who chose to deeply embed himself in the character of the Joker (for Suicide Squad) through sending “horrifying” gifts to his castmates. These, according to various accounts, included dead pigs and rats to intimate objects and personal hygiene products, though the actor refuted those worst excesses. And then, naturally, there is Jim Carrey, who went so deep as Andy Kaufman for Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded to get a feature-length documentary out of B-roll of him making life as impossible as he could for his colleagues.
Contemporary Method Practitioners
The foremost practitioner of the Method at the moment seems to be Jeremy Strong (once Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process during Succession was so rigorously detailed that it formed the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were either concerned for his behaviour (“It’s the cost on himself that worries me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by it (“I remember [him] making others to react with exasperation,” stated an anonymous cast member).
Daniel Day-Lewis says he ‘did not plan to stop acting, truly’
We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex over half a year for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in an animal carcass for The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that actor Austin Butler continues to talk in the style of Elvis, three years after that film came out. All of this, in part, is meant to invoke the dedication in which Day-Lewis approaches his work.
An Admirable But Uphill Battle
And, although his rebuttal to critics of the Method might be noble, a brief promotional cycle may prove insufficient to alter perceptions, let alone their behaviour. Perhaps if he wants to remind people what method acting is, or to show them its potential results, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to just begin producing additional movies. Surely everyone would get behind that.
