Ah, “Method acting.” It’s one of the most well-known, controversial, and at times misunderstood concepts in the history of performance. As first conceived by Lee Strasberg, the technique involves fully understanding and experiencing a character’s life as if it were your own.
Over the years, the Method has produced countless on-set stories of actors going the extra mile in order to live authentically as their character. Here are a few of the most famous examples—from the basically benign to the downright dangerous.
Jared Leto
In many respects, Leto has become the poster child of taking Method acting to its limits. “When I take on a role, I’m obsessed,” the actor told us in 2022. “I want to know everything. I want to know what my character’s favorite food is. I want to know the last time he took a shower. I want to know, is he right-handed, is he left-handed? What’s his middle name? Because you never know when it’s gonna pay off.”
To play Batman villain the Joker in David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” (2016), Leto famously sent what his co-star Viola Davis described as “pretty horrific gifts” to his castmates. That included a live rat sent to Margot Robbie, a box of bullets to Will Smith, a dead hog for the entire crew, and—in his own words—”anal beads” and “used condoms.”
“I did a lot of things to create a dynamic, to create an element of surprise, of spontaneity, and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there,” Leto said. “The Joker is somebody who doesn’t really respect things like personal space or boundaries.”
More recently, for Daniel Espinosa’s “Morbius,” Leto stayed in character to play the title role, a scientist who suffers from a debilitating blood illness. Espinosa confirmed that Leto’s commitment to using crutches between takes held up production, to the point where a deal was made to get him a wheelchair.
“[W]hat Jared believes, is that somehow the pain of those movements, even when he was playing normal Michael Morbius, he needed, because he’s been having this pain his whole life,” the director said. “Even though, as he’s alive and strong, it has to be a difference. Hey, man, it’s people’s processes.”
Is Method Acting Dangerous? Christian Bale
Bale would tell you he’s not a Method actor. “That takes studying,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I just do whatever I feel like I’ve got to do on the day.”
But what Bale does certainly fits the bill, at least when it comes to dramatic physical transformations. The actor had his teeth reconstructed to play Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” and gained more than 40 pounds to portray Dick Cheney in “Vice.” But his most shocking piece of preparation came in 2004, for Brad Anderson’s psychological thriller, “The Machinist.”
The film follows a man named Trevor Reznik, whose insomnia has led to him becoming severely emaciated. Bale wanted to be Reznik, so he dropped 62 pounds in four months, living on a daily diet of black coffee, one apple, and a tin of tuna. “When you’re so skinny that you can hardly walk up a flight of stairs…you’re, like, this being of pure thought,” Bale told The Guardian. “It’s like you’ve abandoned your body. That’s the most Zen-like state I’ve ever been in my life. Two hours sleep, reading a book for 10 hours straight without stopping…unbelievable. You couldn’t rile me up. No rollercoaster of emotions.”
Even more surprising: Bale bulked back up to play Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” in just six months.
Daniel Day-Lewis
The now-retired Day-Lewis is arguably the most recognized modern-day Method actor. In fact, the intense commitment he brings to each role is part of the reason the Oscar winner retired in the first place.
“Before making the film, I didn’t know I was going to stop acting,” Day-Lewis told W Magazine of 2017’s “Phantom Thread,” to date his final movie. “I do know that [director Paul Thomas Anderson] and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing because we were both overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. That took us by surprise: We didn’t realize what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with. And still is.”
The actor’s approach is rooted in adopting every aspect of the character’s life and never shedding that skin until production wraps. For Jim Sheridan’s “My Left Foot” (1989), in which he played a man with cerebral palsy, crew members carried Day-Lewis around and fed him during breaks. “He’d call you by your film name, and you’d call him Christy [his character’s name]. It was madness,” recalled actor Kirsten Sheridan. “You’d be feeding him, wheeling him around. During the entire film, I only saw him walking once.”
That mindset is a constant in his career. Before shooting began on Nicholas Hytner’s “The Crucible,” the actor built the wooden home his character, a Puritan farmer, would live in. While filming Michael Mann’s period piece “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992), Day-Lewis learned how to build a canoe, only ate food he skinned and cooked, and had a 12-pound Flintlock musket wherever he went. To stay in the headspace of the violent Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” Day-Lewis picked fights with strangers on the streets of Rome.
Method Acting vs. Other Techniques Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody beat out more than 1,400 actors for the role of Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” (2002). The film is a biopic of Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist who miraculously survived World War II in the ruins of Warsaw. The character is left with nothing—and Brody wanted to feel the same. “I eliminated a lot of things in my own life before I left for Berlin and Warsaw for eight months,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I sold my car, dropped my apartment, put everything in storage, got rid of my cell phone, and fired some people.…”
Brody used that distraction-free time to practice piano for four hours a day and lose 30 pounds in six weeks. “There is an emptiness that comes with really starving that I hadn't experienced,” he told the BBC. “I couldn't have acted that without knowing it. I've experienced loss, I've experienced sadness in my life, but I didn't know the desperation that comes with hunger.”
Was it worth it? Brody won an Academy Award for the performance, but noted it “took over half a year after the film was done to settle back into things."
Jim Carrey
Throughout the 1990s, Jim Carrey crafted his own brand of loud, rambunctious comedy. But as the decade waned, the actor started to flex his more dramatic side. In 1999, he landed the lead role in Miloš Forman’s “Man on the Moon,” a biopic of famed “anti”-comedian Andy Kaufman. As intimately revealed in the behind-the-scenes documentary “Jim & Andy,” Carrey refused to break character as Kaufman—or his obnoxious alter-ego, Tony Clifton—for the entirety of the production.
“It was not easy. He was great, but it was tricky, because it was sometimes hard to fit yourself around what he was doing, being in the [character] all the time,” recalled Paul Giamatti, who plays writer and comedian Bob Zmuda in the film. Giamatti said that it was “particularly mayhem off the set” whenever Carrey was portraying Kaufman’s “belligerent fucking asshole” character Clifton. “[He was] browbeating everybody,” the actor says, “walking around with stinky cheese in his pockets, smearing stinky cheese on people when he’d hug you.”
For Carrey, the role and production was a life-altering experience. In the documentary, the comedian reflects: “It was definitely an important moment in the process where I found myself subjugating Jim Carrey for Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton.… And at a certain point, I realized, ‘Hey, wait a second. If it’s so easy to lose Jim Carrey, who the hell is Jim Carrey?’”
Hilary Swank
One of the most sought after actresses of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Swank had her first highly publicized dive into method acting in Kimberly Peirce’s “Boys Don’t Cry” (1999). To get into the head of trans man Brandon Teena, the actor dieted down to 7 percent body fat, shaved her hair, and strived to pass as male while meeting everyone in production. “[Pierce] wanted me to do the best that I could in kind of passing as a boy everywhere before [meeting] them,” Swank told the Hollywood Reporter. “If they saw me as a boy, that was important to her.”
But it was her commitment to Clint Eastwood’s sports drama “Million Dollar Baby” (2004) that almost turned deadly. To play aspiring pro boxer Maggie Fitzgerald, Swank put on 19 pounds of muscle while training in the ring for five hours a day. The hours in the gym worked—but they also resulted in a life-threatening staph infection on her foot. Locked into Margaret’s mental state, Swank kept the illness from her director. “I didn't tell Clint, because in the end, that’s what happens to boxers,” she told CBS News. “They get blisters, they get infected. They have injuries and they keep pushing through it.”
Lady Gaga
You might think of music before Method when it comes to Lady Gaga, but the 13-time Grammy winner—back when she went by Stefani Germanotta—studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute for 10 years before launching her acting era. When she pivoted back to screen performance, Gaga put that training to the test.
For the role of fashion matriarch Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci” (2021), Gaga said: “I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as [Reggiani] for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that.” That level of immersion didn’t just apply when the cameras were rolling. “I never broke,” Gaga explained. “I stayed with her.”
That dedication reportedly carried over to Todd Phillips’ DC Comics sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” in which Gaga plays Batman villain Harley Quinn opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. “I didn’t know Stefani at all,” the film’s cinematographer Lawrence Sher told “The Trenches Talk” podcast. The DP says he felt a disconnect with the actor until he started to call her by her character’s name.
“The AD at one point said, ‘Oh you know, Stef would like if you just called her Lee on set,'” Sher recalled. “And I was like, 100 percent. The next thing I said was something ‘Lee,’ and it was like everything changed.”
Austin Butler
Austin Butler has become quite the rising star over the past few years, a run largely kick-started by his Oscar-nominated performance in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” (2022), in the title role. Butler truly devoted himself to shedding his own personality for Presley’s.
“[My process] became: What is my own relationship to this man?” the actor told us. “How can I diminish the line between me trying to be someone else and instead just really feel like I’m seeing the world through his eyes?”
As a result, the actor famously had trouble shedding the Elvis persona—most notably the musician’s distinctive Southern accent—long after production wrapped. Butler later admitted that he had to hire a dialect coach to help regain his natural speech patterns.
That’s an example of Method acting that’s both extreme and benign. While the whole accent situation was a bit funny and harmless in the end, it came from the fact that Butler isolated himself from friends and family for years while prepping for “Elvis.”
Photos credits:
Leto: Tinseltown/Shutterstock, Bale: Loredana Sangiuliano/Shutterstock, Day-Lewis: Ga Fullner/Shutterstock, Brody: lev radin/Shutterstock, Carrey: DFree/Shutterstock, Swank: Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock, Gaga: Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock,
