It has been a long while since the public caught a glimpse of Daniel Day-Lewis. Following his announcement in 2017 declaring he would no longer work as an actor, just before the debut of Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis quietly faded from view. Yet, during his hiatus, his reputation has only grown.
The Mythos of His Method
Primarily, this reputation centers on his favored approach to roles. As someone who famously immerses himself in his characters – for instance, during Lincoln, reportedly asked Steven Spielberg address him as “Mr. President” throughout the shoot – audiences has grown more fascinated with his process. Did he really send texts to Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Was it accurate that he only eat animals he’d killed for 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 actorly excess?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis is back in the limelight, with some hesitation, promoting his latest movie Anemone. And he is using this to express his frustration regarding how method acting is viewed. “I am somewhat annoyed nowadays to hear all kinds of people talking carelessly and saying things like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which seems suggests that someone is acting insane in a drastic way,” he told a major publication. “People often concentrate on the less important aspects of acting, and those details typically include some form of self-punishment or an experience that causes extreme unease or psychological strain. However, in the career of an actor, it must principally be about the inner transformation.”
An Industry Full of Followers
To be honest, this sounds like Day-Lewis has come out from his retreat only to discover shocked by the world that has developed in his image. When you are widely considered among the best performers to ever work, and your process involves headbutting a dummy to the point of injury (for Gangs of New York) or spending two days in solitary confinement without food or water (for In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that other actors will want 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 strive only to show the world the sheer amount of dedication they invest in 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 transformed into functionally Italian for a year and a half as preparation.
Additionally, there is Jared Leto, who decided to deeply embed himself into the role as the Joker (for Suicide Squad) by sending “disturbing” gifts to fellow cast members. These items, depending on who you ask, included dead pigs and rats to intimate objects and used condoms, though Leto denied those worst excesses. And then, naturally, there is Jim Carrey, who went so deep into Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that they literally managed in creating a full-length documentary out of B-roll of him causing difficulties as impossible as he could for his colleagues.
The Modern Method Practitioners
The foremost practitioner of the Method currently seems to be Jeremy Strong (once Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process while filming Succession was so laboriously intensive that it formed the subject of a critical New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were worried for his behaviour (“It’s the cost on himself concerns me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by it (“I remember him causing everyone else roll their eyes,” said an anonymous cast member).
Daniel Day-Lewis claims he ‘never intended to stop acting, really’
We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield went celibate for six months while preparing for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in an animal carcass for The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that actor Austin Butler continues to talk like Elvis Presley, three years after that film came out. All of this, to some extent, is meant to invoke the seriousness in which Day-Lewis approaches his work.
An Admirable Yet Challenging Fight
Moreover, although his rebuttal to critics of the Method might be noble, a short publicity tour may prove insufficient to alter perceptions, let alone their practices. Maybe if he wishes to remind people what method acting is, or to show them what it can achieve, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to just begin producing more films. Certainly everyone would support that idea.
