Inside The Hollywood Method Acting Backlash

Method acting has long been a point of contention in Hollywood – some say it’s pretentious and unnecessary, others think it’s an integral part of creating a real, truthful character on screen. After being heralded for decades, the method has in recent years begun receiving a lot of backlash. Even performances that are still seen as good are getting pushback for how the actors seemed to get a little too into their roles – like Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon (or Joker… or I’m Still Here…), Jeremy Strong in Succession, or Austin Butler in Elvis. So what’s really behind this turn against method acting?

CHAPTERS
00:00 What's behind the backlash?
00:46 Where the method came from
03:24 The craziest method horror stories
10:18 The conversation today

CREDITS
Executive Producers: Debra Minoff & Susannah McCullough
Chief Creative Director: Susannah McCullough
Associate Producer: Tyler Allen
Writer: Abigail Barr
Narrator: Jessica Babineaux
Video Editor: Tyler Allen

[azohundred]

Famously, on the set of Marathon Man, Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman, who was literally passing out during shoots after depriving himself of sleep for several days to get into character:
"My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?"

[pop]

You can’t compare Robert DeNiro driving a cab to prepare for Taxi Driver to Jared Leto be rude to his co-stars.

[sade]

So in short: it’s mostly male actors who do it and misbehave in the name of their art and it’s mostly actresses who suffer the consequence. Imagine Viola Davis doing what Leto did. Yeah. She’d be done in Hollywood.

[mbanerjee]

Staying in character 24/7 is just an excuse to be a jerk. If you can't turn your character on and off, it's not acting. That's why you never hear about any positive examples of it because it's just an ego trip.

[bartmann]

The thing about method acting that gives is so much backlash, is the way it’s presented as the ultimate form of commitment to your art. By implication, actors who learn their lines and make their marks, are taking the easy route.

The plain fact is that most actors have to rely on their technique, because to make a living and can’t afford to invest time and effort into a role. In other words, Method Acting is something for the privileged few.

[bartmann]

My guess is that the recent backlash against Method Acting (or that what is perceived as Method Acting) is not so much directed at its techniques and means themselves, but at the fetishising of it.

Nothing is more likely to get an actor awards consideration then a carefully planned media campaign about how much effort and preparation he put into the role. Also Method Acting is often identified with playing eccentric, bombastic, larger than life characters and extreme physical challenging roles, the kind of acting that is easy to point at and say: wow, that’s good.

Consequently, the fascination with how much actors suffer for their art, almost always comes at the expense of the more nuanced, low-key performances and more commonplace characters, the kind of acting that is so good and natural that you forget that you are watching a performance.

Perhaps that’s why Donald Sutherland never won an Oscar

[ElvisRose_]

It's kind of funny how people talk about Austin Butler's extreme method acting for Elvis by saying things like, "He didn't see his family for 3 years!" yet leaving out the important part about the movie getting shut down in the middle of production for the minor hiccup of a global pandemic.

[turkoizdog]

I don't know if this counts as method, but I love that Margot Robbie gave Ryan Gosling a gift every day of their shoot, in character from Barbie to Ken. Or Cillian Murphy diving into learning about physics for his role in Sunshine and again in Oppenheimer. That's the kind of method acting I want to hear about.

[BloodyMary]

Natalie Potrman did ballet for hours a day because she needed the muscle memory of a professional ballerina. Same thing with actors playing soldiers, martial artists, cowboys etc. You cannot just act that.

[robchuk]

For those of us who have directed others, you know every actor has their own process to get where they need to go. I don't mind the technique at all, as long as they aren't hurting themselves or others. The thing about it is, you never hear about method acting for "happy" characters. How fun would it be if people were method on a comedies?

[PokhrajRoy.]

Moral of the Story: Just get a therapist on retainer as soon as possible.

[AKApopstarAKAproblem]

Method acting is like that one coworker who pushes themselves to exhaustion taking no breaks, while everyone else is taking lunch breaks and 15 min and is getting the same results. It’s just not impressive

[nathanielfishburn]

Proposal: We gather the most problematic male "Method actors" together and cast them in an movie about how a group of problematic Method actors learn to set healthy boundaries between themselves and their art and be respectful toward their colleagues. Feign a big media and Oscar campaign based on how deep they go into their characters. It might just work.

[emmac]

One story that always stuck with me was how Jim Carey started shit with Jerry Lawler because he “felt that’s how Andy would act” but Lawler in interviews talks about how he and Kaufman were friendly and they planned the whole thing together. Like, you think you’re magically tapping into a dead man but you’re completely off track.

[DavidSGrop]

What they're doing isn't even method acting. Method acting just means using past experiences to aid your performance; you need to be sad? Think of something sad that happened to you. That's it, you're now a method actor. All this staying-in-character crap is just self indulgent narcissism.

[rubytuesdayphoenix]

Joaquin's Oscar speech, which was very briefly excerpted at 8:04 is wrongly cited as "Method." He wasn't being obnoxious or being inappropriate; he has been an animal rights activist, environmentalist, and vegan for nearly his whole life and these are issues he feels very passionately about. There is of course a very robust discourse about celebs using awards acceptance speeches to get on their soapbox, especially when it's just a lil hypocritical (I'm looking at you, Leo Yacht DiCaprio!) and there have certainly been people who cited this speech as an example of this, but context is so important. Joaquin is an introvert in an extrovert profession and he clearly was very anxious making that speech, but he pushed through the anxiety to shine the spotlight given to him in that moment to issues he felt needed to be elevated. Even if you want to somehow call the majority of his speech "soapboxing, " there is no denying the painful sincerity of the last part of the speech, when he quoted his brother, the late great River Phoenix, who himself was very ahead of his time in the 80s, alerting people to the urgency of animal rights and environmentalism (and who sadly is not known to a lot of media consumers today, so they don't have this context). It was surprising as he has been famously reticent about talking about his brother publicly after the grotesque media circus after River's death (the 911 call he made for River the night he died was played all over the news at the time so that was sadly kind of his introduction to mainstream recognition, so his resuming of his acting career a couple of years later was in the shadow of that), and it was very moving to see him still coping with that very painful loss nearly three decades later. That's not Method. That's not acting. That's not Joaquin Phoenix being a downer. That was a man making his big brother very proud. Please, context matters.

[cameronfield]

It's music theatre but a lot pf the acting teachers at music theatre courses at Uni borderline ban you from method acting

Their reasoning is that last thing we need is to have a bunch if actors open up old worlds or past traumas for work when you can just learn the technique to be a good actor safely

[ZoraTheberge]

It can be a good choice when applied right. Ie: Meryl knew her status as an actor would be akin to her character’s in “The Devil Wears Prada” so she was intentionally very distant with fellow actors and it served to create an atmosphere when she was in the room.

Also, if I were in a film and doing a dialect, I would stay in that voice 24/7. It needs to sound lived-in.

[cyro]

What bugs me about these countless video essays or article pieces about "method" acting is the frequent inaccuracies about what can be considered as the ridiculousness of the "Day-Lewis" method (which is the method that people & general public think of when they hear "method" acting, rather than the Stanislavski/Strasberg one). For example, Phoenix asking the dentist for prosthetic to create his clinched jaw look for The Master, I wouldn't consider that as being included in the ridiculousness of "method" acting, if anything that is just the normal routine of an actor crafting their character from the way they think their character should look like physically, i.e, no difference to an actor putting on certain makeup, certain walk, posture, speech, behaviour/ticks, etc to achieve a certain look for certain characters. That is it, it's not that big of a deal. It's not "unnecessary", that's just part of an actor's tasks, making decisions on how their character should look like. Cuz just from the look of the character alone, it can tell a little bit about their background story (subliminally).

Unnecessary here means the way Daniel Day-Lewis asks the cast & crew to call him by his character's name and speaking as his characters EVEN when there really is no reason to (like when no cameras are rolling). Or like that absurd Jim Carrey documentary, staying in character for no reason when the cameras not rolling other than to bother and terrorize the director creating bad vibes on set, and then claiming he had "no control over his actions, because it was actually Andy Kaufman's ghost that made me do it". Now that is what unnecessary means when it comes to the infamous "method", not whatever Phoenix is doing. From what I read of various articles of the behind the scenes of his many films, or even from the directors he worked with, when the cameras are not rolling, he's just simply Joaquin, the actor, an inquisitive one as well, constantly asking the director questions about his character to better understand and studying his characters. Phoenix I would say is more aligned with the original Stanislavski/Strasberg kind of method, rather than the distorted absurd/ridiculous "Day-Lewis" method that the general public came to know today.

Of course, this is not to bash Daniel Day-Lewis, cuz whatever he's doing, it seems to work magnificently for him, without creating actual bad vibes or discomfort towards his fellow co-workers. Same thing for Jeremy Strong, seems to give him great results, while not physically bothering his co-workers. See that type of "Day-Lewis" method is TOLERABLE. Is it still considered ridiculous? sure to some degree, but ultimately no harm done to others, hence tolerable. Now compare that to Jim Carey, or even Jared Leto who sent used condoms to Margot Robbie, bullets to Will Smith and dead animals to his fellow cast members of Suicide Squad, then yes, that is absolutely INTOLERABLE & RIDICULOUS alright, and well deserved to be condemned and roll our eyes to. Leto & Carrey's "method" is the issue here, and should be frowned upon regardless of whether it's a man, woman, white, or non-white that does it.

[kaiwilliams]

How come it's never extremely kind and thoughtful characters that actors seem to method act as? It does raise a question (and this isn't totally my opinion) but how good of an actor are you if you have to "experience" the entirety of your character? Research is one thing, accent and dialect practice is another but to me it's more impressive if you can just slip in and out of character without "totally becoming" the character