It’s been a long while since anyone caught a glimpse of Daniel Day-Lewis. After he announcement in 2017 declaring he would no longer pursue acting, just before the debut of The Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis withdrew from the spotlight. Yet, in his absence, his reputation expanded further.
The Mythos Surrounding His Method
Largely, this reputation revolves around his preferred style of working. As someone who famously disappears into his characters – for example, while filming the Lincoln biopic, he had the director address him as “Mr. President” throughout the shoot – audiences has grown increasingly obsessed with how he works. 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 Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on receiving food via spoon for My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: have we fallen out of love with over-the-top performances?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis is back to public attention, with some hesitation, promoting his latest movie Anemone. He is using this to vocalise his frustration at 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 suggests that a person’s acting insane in an extreme fashion,” he stated to the New York Times. “Everyone tends to focus on the less important details of the work, and those details always seem to involve some sort of self-punishment or a situation that causes extreme unease or mental instability. However, in the life for a performer, it has to mainly focus on the inner transformation.”
An Industry of Imitators
To be honest, it appears as if Day-Lewis has emerged from his retreat and found himself aghast at the acting community that has been created in his image. When you are regarded as one of the greatest actors in history, and your process involves headbutting a dummy until you break your nose (for Gangs of New York) or enduring 48 hours in solitary confinement deprived of sustenance (during In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that other actors will attempt to emulate that example by trying to mimic their idol.
In other words, we now live in an environment populated by half-cocked Day-Lewis impersonators who want nothing more than to demonstrate the sheer amount of effort they put into their roles. At the shallow end of the pool we have people like Lady Gaga, who was determined to earn an Academy Award for House of Gucci that she dedicated the entire promotion attempting to persuade people that she became functionally Italian over 18 months in preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who chose to deeply embed himself in the character of the Joker (in Suicide Squad) through sending “horrifying” gifts to his castmates. These items, according to various accounts, included dead pigs and rats to anal beads and used condoms, though the actor refuted the most extreme claims. And then, of course, there is Jim Carrey, who went so deep as Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded in creating a feature-length documentary from behind-the-scenes footage of him making life to the utmost for his colleagues.
Contemporary Method Practitioners
The main Method Guy currently seems to be Jeremy Strong (formerly an assistant to Day-Lewis), whose approach during Succession was so laboriously intensive that it formed the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, including statements from people who were either concerned about his conduct (“The toll on himself concerns me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by it (“I remember [him] making others roll their eyes,” stated an anonymous cast member).
Daniel Day-Lewis says he ‘never intended to stop acting, truly’
There are numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield went celibate for six months while preparing for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in a dead animal during The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that Austin Butler continues to talk in the style of Elvis, three years after that film came out. Each of these instances, to some extent, aims to evoke the seriousness with which Day-Lewis takes his craft.
An Admirable Yet Challenging Fight
And, while his fightback 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 what method acting is, or to show them what it can achieve, then the optimal strategy for Day-Lewis is to simply begin producing more films. Certainly we could all support that idea.
