Daniel Day-Lewis has defended method acting, saying the criticism usually comes from “people that have little or no understanding” of what it entails.
Speaking in conversation with critic Mark Kermode at the BFI London Film Festival on Wednesday, the three-time Academy Award-winning actor addressed the pushback against method acting, arguing that the method was a way of “freeing yourself,” as opposed to being in a “cult”.
“All the recent commentary in the last few years about method acting is invariably from people who have little or no understanding of what it actually involves,” said Day-Lewis, who is returning to acting in the film Anemone after an eight-year hiatus.
“It’s almost as if it’s some specious science that we’re involved in, or a cult. But it’s just a way of freeing yourself so that the spontaneity, when you are working with your colleagues in front of the camera, that you are free to respond in any way that you’ll move to in that moment.”
“It is very easy to describe what I do as if I’m out of my mind. Plenty of people have been happy to do that, but it just makes sense to me. You have an obligation to try to understand as far as you’re humanly able to what it feels like to be inside of that experience,” he said, per The Guardian.
The 68-year-old actor, who has been known to fully immerse himself in a role, explained that the process didn’t mean “you’re sealed off from experiencing” your own life, but that “you’re in a self-contained experience of your own”.
“But really, if you’ve done your work, you should be free to accept whatever passes through you.”
Anemone, which Day-Lewis wrote with his son, explores “fraught” relationships between fathers and sons and between brothers with a “mysterious, complicated past”.
The movie stars Sean Bean as Jem, a middle-aged man who sets out from his suburban home on a journey into the woods where he reconnects with his estranged hermit brother Ray, played by Day-Lewis.
Earlier this month, Day-Lewis said he was a “little cross” at how people used the term method acting to imply that someone is behaving like a “lunatic”.
“I don't really like thinking of acting in terms of craft at all. Of course, there are techniques you can learn, and I know that the method has become an easy target these days,” he told the New York Times.
“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.”
The actor explained how working on Jim Sheridan’s 1989 film My Left Foot, where he played Irish writer and painter Christy Brown who was born with cerebral palsy and could control only his left foot, was how he discovered the method acting process.
“Quite obviously, I would not be able to make that now – at the time it was already questionable,” adding that “a couple of the kids that helped me so much at the Sandymount Clinic [for people with cerebral palsy] made it clear to me that they didn’t think I should be doing it.”
Explaining that he had time to really get in the skin of the character while financing for the film was put together, Day-Lewis said he took “very gentle steps” towards the process.
“Because there was no money when I signed up for it, I moved over to Dublin on this wing and a prayer,” he said. “And there was all the time in the world. I started to work with these wonderful people, I had a little house and I had my paints and my wheelchair and everything I needed. I guess I had a couple of months before we finally scraped enough money to do the first few scenes and I thought: ‘I’m never not going to work like this again.’
“I thought of the wheelchair as a cage, and I began to work a lot with my foot.”
My Left Foot received five nominations at the Oscars, including best picture, with Day-Lewis taking home his first Oscar for his role.
He continued: “If you’ve got the responsibility of portraying a life like Christy Brown, who was a huge and noble figure in Irish society, you have an obligation to try to understand, as far as you’re humanly possible, what it feels like to be inside of that experience.”
“I still find that process a joyful thing. We’re playing games for a living.”
Anemone, directed by the actor’s son Ronan, is the first film Day-Lewis has made since 2017’s Phantom Thread, which he initially stated would be his final film. In September, Day-Lewis said he regretted how definitive his retirement statement sounded.
“Looking back on it now – I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” he told Rolling Stone. “It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work.”
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