It’s been a long while since the public saw or heard from Daniel Day-Lewis. After he statement in 2017 declaring he would no longer work as an actor, just before the debut of Phantom Thread, the actor withdrew from the spotlight. Yet, during his hiatus, his reputation expanded further.
The Legend of His Acting Method
Primarily, this reputation centers on his preferred style of working. As someone who famously immerses himself in the roles he plays – for example, while filming the Lincoln biopic, he had Steven Spielberg call him “Mr. President” for the entire production – the world has become increasingly obsessed with his process. Did he really send texts to Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Did he consumed solely game he hunted for The Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on receiving food via spoon while filming My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: have we lost interest with actorly excess?
Currently, Day-Lewis has returned in the limelight, with some hesitation, for his new film Anemone. He is using this to vocalise his anger regarding how the Method technique is viewed. “I am somewhat annoyed nowadays to hear all kinds of people gobbling off and saying things like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which seems suggests that a person’s behaving like a lunatic in an extreme fashion,” he told a major publication. “Everyone tends to focus 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. But of course, in the career of an actor, it has to principally be about the internal work.”
An Industry Full of Followers
Frankly, this sounds as if the actor has come out from seclusion and found himself aghast at the acting community that has been created mirroring his methods. When you are regarded as among the best 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 solitary confinement without food or water (during In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that fellow performers will want to emulate that example by trying to mimic their idol.
In other words, we now live in a landscape populated by half-cocked imitators of Day-Lewis who strive only to demonstrate the extensive degree of effort they invest in a character. On the milder side of this trend we have people like Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to earn an Academy Award for House of Gucci that she dedicated the whole campaign trying to convince everyone that she became functionally Italian for a year and a half in preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who chose to deeply embed himself in the character of the Joker (for Suicide Squad) by sending “horrifying” presents to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, range from dead pigs and rats to anal beads and used condoms, though Leto denied those worst excesses. And then, naturally, we have Jim Carrey, who immersed himself so fully into Andy Kaufman for Man on the Moon that they succeeded to get a feature-length documentary from behind-the-scenes footage of him making life as impossible as he could for everyone around him.
Contemporary Method Practitioners
The foremost practitioner of the Method at the moment seems to be Jeremy Strong (formerly Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process while filming Succession was so laboriously intensive that it became the basis of a derisive magazine feature, including statements from individuals who were worried about his conduct (“It’s the cost to himself that worries me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by it (“I remember him causing everyone else to react with exasperation,” stated an unnamed co-star).
Daniel Day-Lewis claims he ‘never intended to retire, really’
There are so many other examples. 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 still speaks in the style of Elvis, three years after the movie’s release. All of this, to some extent, is meant to invoke the dedication in which Day-Lewis takes his craft.
A Noble But Uphill Fight
Moreover, although his rebuttal against method detractors might be noble, a brief promotional cycle may prove insufficient to alter perceptions, not to mention their practices. Maybe if he wishes 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 start making more films. Certainly we could all get behind that.
