So we all heard about that Daniel Day-Lewis story where he would force people to treat him like President Lincoln on the set of his biopic EVEN BETWEEN THE TAKES, right?
Well, that's method acting. What is that? You may ask…
To answer that question we have to go back to the 30s when the Group Theatre in New York City approached and made a key element of acting the Stanislavskij method: the technique consisted of the actor approaching the emotions of the character as his own, understanding and experiencing their intentions in first person. That leads to an intense performance that is not just pretended emotions anymore, but real feelings that the actor put himself into.
The method became very popular after being approached by little nobodies like MARLON BRANDO and JAMES DEAN. No big deal. Now many actors have been following the legacy of the masters, giving more and more realistic interpretations every year. One of the most famous is Daniel Day-Lewis, who dives fully into the character’s world, story, personality, and even disability, as well as Christian Bale whose weight loss has shocked people for years. Recently, Lady Gaga has used the method to preserve her Italian accent for her role in House of Gucci.
However, lately some Hollywood actors have come up with controversial opinions about the method acting. Samuel L. Jackson considers it a waste of time, and an incredibly dangerous form of acting: in his opinion acting should be a pretending game, a safe place where you know that, by the time the director yells CUT, you are back in your world where everything is fine and you are out of danger.
Mads Mikkelsen, the star of Hannibal and the last Fantastic beast and where to find them, has even gone further calling it pretentious and just bulls**t, a method that created an inhospitable environment and an excuse for inappropriate behavior.
Although the method has brought some questionable anecdotes from the set, like the experience of Leonardo di Caprio in The Revenant, for which he ate raw bison, slept in animal carcasses, and even froze to almost hypothermia, it can't be denied that it brought alive some of the best performance of the history of cinema. If it is morally right or not, you can judge that.
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