It has been a long while since anyone saw or heard from Daniel Day-Lewis. Following his announcement in 2017 that he would no longer pursue acting, just before the debut of Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis quietly faded from view. Yet, in his absence, his legend has only grown.
The Legend of His Method
Primarily, this reputation centers on his preferred approach to roles. Being an actor who famously disappears into the roles he plays – for example, during the Lincoln biopic, he had the director call him “Mr. President” throughout the shoot – the world has become increasingly obsessed with how he works. Is it true he actually sent messages to co-star Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Did he consumed solely game he hunted for The Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on being spoon-fed for My Left Foot?
Madness in their method: have we lost interest with over-the-top performances?
Now, Daniel Day-Lewis is back in the limelight, with some hesitation, for his new film Anemone. And he is using this to vocalise his frustration regarding how method acting is viewed. “I’m a little cross these days when I hear various individuals talking carelessly and using phrases like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which I think is meant to imply that someone is behaving like a lunatic in a drastic way,” he told the New York Times. “Everyone tends to focus on superficial details of the work, and those details always seem to involve some form of self-flagellation or an experience that causes a severe discomfort or mental instability. However, in the career of an actor, it has to mainly focus on the inner transformation.”
A World of Imitators
To be honest, it appears like Day-Lewis has emerged from his retreat and found himself aghast at the acting community that has developed mirroring his methods. When you are regarded as among the best actors in history, and your process involves striking a prop to the point of injury (for Gangs of New York) or enduring 48 hours in isolation deprived of sustenance (for In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that fellow performers will want to fill that vacuum by imitating your hero.
Essentially, we now live in an environment populated by half-cocked imitators of Day-Lewis who want nothing more than to show the world the sheer amount of dedication they invest in their roles. At the shallow end of this trend we have people like Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to win an Oscar for House of Gucci that she spent the entire promotion trying to convince everyone that she became functionally Italian for a year and a half as preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who chose to deeply embed himself into the role of the Joker (in Suicide Squad) through sending “disturbing” gifts to his castmates. These items, according to various accounts, range from dead pigs and rats to anal beads and used condoms, although Leto denied those worst excesses. And then, of course, we have Jim Carrey, who went so deep as Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded in creating a full-length documentary from behind-the-scenes footage of him making life to the utmost for everyone around him.
The Modern Method Practitioners
The foremost Method Guy currently would appear to be Jeremy Strong (once Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose approach while filming Succession was so rigorously detailed that it formed the subject of a critical New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were worried about his conduct (“The toll on himself concerns me,” said co-star Brian Cox) or extremely irritated by his actions (“I recall him causing others to react with exasperation,” stated an unnamed co-star).
Daniel Day-Lewis says he ‘never intended to retire, really’
We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield went celibate for six months for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in a dead animal during The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that Austin Butler still speaks like Elvis Presley, three years after that film came out. All of this, to some extent, aims to evoke the seriousness in which Day-Lewis takes his work.
A Noble But Uphill Fight
And, while his fightback against method detractors could be commendable, a brief promotional cycle might not be enough to change anyone’s mind, let alone their behaviour. Perhaps if he wants to remind people what method acting is, or to demonstrate what it can achieve, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to just start making additional movies. Certainly everyone would support that idea.
