It has been a while since anyone saw or heard from Daniel Day-Lewis. After he issued the statement “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” in 2017 before the release of The Phantom Thread, the man quietly faded from view. However, in his absence, it’s fair to say that his legend grew somewhat.
Largely, this legend revolved around his favoured style of working. As someone who famously prefers to disappear into his characters while making a film – for Lincoln, he had Steven Spielberg call him “Mr President” for the duration of the shoot – the world has grown increasingly obsessed with his process. Did he really send texts to Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Did he only eat animals he’d killed and skinned himself for The Last of the Mohicans? Did he insist on being spoon-fed food for My Left Foot?
However, now Daniel Day-Lewis is back in the limelight, somewhat reluctantly, for his new film Anemone. And he is using this as an opportunity to vocalise his anger at how method acting is perceived. “I’m a little cross these days to hear all kinds of people gobbling off and saying things like ‘gone full method’, which I think is meant to imply that a person’s behaving like a lunatic in an extreme fashion,” he told the New York Times. “Everyone tends to focus on the less important details of the work, and those details always seem to involve some sort of self-flagellation or an experience that imposes upon oneself a severe discomfort or mental instability. But of course, in the life of an actor, it has to principally be about the internal work.”
To be honest, this sounds as if Day-Lewis has burrowed out of his hole and found himself aghast at the world that has been created in his image. If you’re widely considered to be one of the greatest actors to ever work, and your process involves headbutting a dummy until you break your nose (Gangs of New York) or spending two days in solitary confinement without food or water (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.
In other words, we now live in a landscape full of half-cocked Day-Lewis impersonators who want nothing more than to show the world the sheer amount of effort they put into a character. At the shallow end of the pool we have people like Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to win an Oscar for House of Gucci that she spent the whole campaign trying to convince everyone that she became functionally Italian for a year and a half in preparation.
Then we have Jared Leto, who chose to immerse himself in the character of the Joker (in, of all things, Suicide Squad) by sending “horrifying” gifts to his castmates. These, depending on who you ask, 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 into Andy Kaufman for Man on the Moon that they literally managed to get a feature-length documentary out of B-roll of him making life as impossible as he could for everyone around him.
The main Method Guy at the moment would appear to be Jeremy Strong (once Day-Lewis’s assistant), whose process during Succession was so laboriously intensive that it formed the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, full of quotes from people who were either concerned for his behaviour (“It’s the cost to himself that worries me,” said Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by it (“I remember [him] making everyone else roll their eyes,” said an unnamed co-star).
There are so many other examples. Andrew Garfield went celibate for six months for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio slept in an animal carcass for 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, is meant to invoke the seriousness in which Day-Lewis takes his work.
And, while his fightback against method detractors might be noble, 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 show them what it can achieve, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to simply start making more films. Surely we could all get behind that.
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