It has been a long while since the public caught a glimpse of Daniel Day-Lewis. After he announcement in 2017 that he would cease to work as an actor, prior to the debut of Phantom Thread, the actor quietly faded from view. Yet, during his hiatus, his reputation has only grown.
The Mythos of His Acting Method
Primarily, this reputation centers on his preferred approach to roles. As someone known for disappears into his characters – for instance, while filming the Lincoln biopic, reportedly asked Steven Spielberg address him as “Mr. President” for the entire production – audiences has grown increasingly obsessed with his process. Did he really send messages to co-star Sally Field in character as Lincoln? Was it accurate that he only eat game he hunted during Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on being spoon-fed while filming My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: have we lost interest with actorly excess?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis has returned in the limelight, with some hesitation, promoting his latest movie Anemone. He is using this to express his anger at how method acting is perceived. “I am somewhat annoyed nowadays to hear all kinds of people gobbling off and saying things like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which I think is meant to imply that a person’s acting insane in an extreme fashion,” he told a major publication. “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 a severe discomfort or mental instability. However, in the life for a performer, it must principally be about the inner transformation.”
An Industry of Imitators
Frankly, this sounds like Day-Lewis has emerged from seclusion and found himself aghast at the world that has developed in his image. When you are widely considered one of the greatest performers in history, and your process involves headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (in Gangs of New York) or spending two days in isolation deprived of sustenance (for In the Name of the Father), it’s natural that fellow performers will attempt to emulate that example 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 dedication they put into a character. At the shallow end of this trend there are performers such as Lady Gaga, who was determined to win an Oscar with House of Gucci that she dedicated the whole campaign attempting to persuade people that she became functionally Italian for a year and a half as preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who decided to immerse himself in the character as the Joker (in Suicide Squad) through sending “disturbing” presents to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, included dead pigs and rats to anal beads and personal hygiene products, although the actor refuted those worst excesses. And then, naturally, there is Jim Carrey, who immersed himself so fully as Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded in creating a full-length documentary from behind-the-scenes footage 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 (formerly Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process while filming Succession was so rigorously detailed that it became the basis of a critical magazine feature, including statements from people who were worried about his conduct (“The toll on himself that worries me,” said Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by his actions (“I recall him causing others roll their eyes,” stated an unnamed co-star).
The actor claims he ‘never intended to stop acting, really’
There are so many other examples. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex for six months for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in a dead animal 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 approaches his craft.
An Admirable But Uphill Battle
And, while his fightback to critics of the Method might be noble, a brief promotional cycle might not be enough to alter perceptions, not to mention their practices. Perhaps if he wants to remind people the true essence of the Method, or to show them its potential results, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to simply begin producing additional movies. Certainly everyone would support that idea.
