The Truth About Method Acting

by Ashley Griffin, Guest Editorial

There’s a well-known tale about the making of the film Marathon Man. (Disclaimer: Actor Dustin Hoffman has said the exchange, as oft-quoted, is not quite accurate, but that doesn’t take away from the heart of the story.)

“Marathon Man” is a 1976 American film in which Dustin Hoffman plays a character who has scenes where he is being tortured – including being in physical pain, out of his mind, and being deprived of sleep. In preparation, Hoffman deliberately didn’t sleep for days and was on the verge of a real-life breakdown. His costar, Laurence Olivier, who was not a fan of Hoffman’s methods, said to him one day:

“My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”

The comment, while funny, points to a deeper issue that has gotten worse in recent years – that of using “method acting” as an excuse to inflict emotional, physical, and psychological harm on oneself or coworkers in the name of “great acting.” Robert De Niro famously paid $20,000 out of his pocket to have his teeth ground down to bring a more ominous look to his character in “Cape Fear.” NYFA shares, among other stories, that of Christian Bale, who dropped sixty-three pounds to achieve a skeletal figure for “The Machinist.”

As NYFA says: “…this was almost an unnecessary devotion on Bale’s part – the weights mentioned in the movie (and written on the bathroom wall) were based on screenwriter Scott Kosar’s own weight, which was comparatively tiny given Kosar is only 5’6’’. When it came time to change them after casting was complete, the 6’0’’ Bale insisted the figures were to be kept as written in an attempt to match them.” They share another story about Daniel Day-Lewis working on “Ganges of New York” during a brutal New York winter where “refusing to wear a warm coat unbefitting of the movie’s era, he developed pneumonia. Naturally, he refused modern medication to treat this right up until practically arriving at death’s door.”

There’s an entire documentary (“Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond…”) about Jim Carrey’s obnoxious, upsetting, and ultimately alienating behavior as he “method acted” his way through the filming of “Man on the Moon.” Of course, most recently, Jared Leto has become the ambassador of this disturbing “method” with reports of his antics, most notably on “Suicide Squad,” where he terrorized his fellow actors both on and off-screen.

What kind of insane method is “The Method?!” Who on earth would teach this to students?!

The truth is that they don’t, and this method isn’t “The Method” at all.

In order to really have a conversation about method acting and recent (well, longstanding, but especially recent) comments in the media about actors’ antics on set – we first need to be clear on what method acting actually is and isn’t – something that’s been woefully missing in most conversations on the subject.

Method acting is an acting technique first referred to in the early/mid-20th century in relation to the acting revolution created by Stanislavsky in Russia and later the Group Theater (following in Stanislavsky’s footsteps) in the United States. There are many books devoted to this part of theater history and acting technique, and I highly recommend you check them out, but here’s a very brief, general rundown.

Before Stanislavsky, much of acting was very presentational in style. If you watch the wonderful film “Stage Beauty,” you can see a phenomenally executed (if WAY historically condensed) depiction of this stylistic change. Stanislavsky thought acting should be more natural and closer to real life and developed his “method” to help actors accomplish this in a safe, repeatable way. For a large portion of the 20th century, when “method acting” was mentioned, it was referring to Stanislavsky’s overall method.

Some years later, several well-respected American actors saw Stanislavsky’s troupe performing in the U.S. and decided they wanted to bring his method to the States. They founded the Group Theater and set about doing in America what Stanislavsky did in Russia. They read his writings and spoke with his students, resulting in three of the main Group Theater founders, each gravitating toward a different aspect of Stanislavsky’s method.

Lee Strasberg was drawn to the sense of memory and personal association aspect of Stanislavsky’s teachings. In the crudest terms, these are the types of exercises that include “Think of a moment in your life when you were sad, recreate it emotionally, and use it in the scene,” etc. When most serious actors today refer to “method acting,” they are referring to Strasberg’s method… sometime in the 20th century, the association of the term shifted from referring to Stanislavsky’s new “method” to Strasberg’s specific interpretation of it.

Sanford Meisner interpreted Stanislavsky differently. He felt Strasberg and the Group Theater were getting WAY too focused on emotional work. Both he and Stella Adler (we’ll get to her in a moment) were concerned about the amount of “indulgent crying” going on in acting classes and felt there was something missing. Meisner latched onto different aspects of Stanislavsky’s work, focusing on the idea that emotion should never forcefully be brought into the equation. He felt instead that focus should be placed solely on the text and that if you were saying the words you were given truthfully, the emotion would just come.

Adler, however, took things to another level. She was the only member of the Group Theater who personally went to Russia and trained with Stanislavsky himself. She told him about what was happening at the Group Theater, and apparently, Stanislavsky said they were doing things all wrong. Apparently, he said Strasberg had focused on the very beginning of the teaching – and stayed there, never moving forward. Stanislavsky felt that Russian actors were, on the whole, not very in touch with their deep emotions and so needed exercises to tap into them. He felt the opposite was true with American actors who had no problem indulging in their feelings.

Because of his teachings, Adler claimed to be the only person who was fully trained in the entirety of Stanislavsky’s technique (in the U.S.,) and what she brought back to the States was a style not focused on emotion or just the text but on the imagination. The “Adler technique” teaches that actors are meant “to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances” and believes that that “truth” can be found in the imagination itself, not just in the personal experience of the actor.

Around the time the Group theater was solidifying its techniques, Hollywood was completely changing its style. Famous actors such as Marlon Brando were training with Strasberg, Meisner, and Adler, taking these techniques to the big screen. This is around the time “method acting” became singularly associated with Strasberg and became famous for bringing a raw naturalism to film. Ironically, some of the most famous “Strasberg” actors (Brando is, again, one example) didn’t actually study with Strasberg, they studied with Adler, but incorrect publicity happened; Strasberg got much of the credit, and many people when watching Brando’s famous “STELLAAAAA!” scene in “Streetcar…” still envision him tapping into some deep, personal, emotional place – a la Strasberg.

For what it’s worth, I personally think there is value in ALL the acting styles and that every actor must figure out a unique combination of the various techniques that work for them. I think (though I have no proof) that one of the reasons Strasberg’s method took off in Hollywood with such gusto is that, because of the way movies are shot, sometimes, if you have to go from 0 to a hysterical mess in the amount of time it takes for a director to yell “action”  - often the most efficient way of doing so is to tap into personal memory.

But I want to make one thing very clear – whatever acting style you ascribe to, emotional safety is always paramount. The founders of the various styles said it themselves. Strasberg, for example, had a rule that you should never attempt to tap into an emotional memory less than seven years old because something more recent would be too triggering in an unhealthy way. None of these teachers were interested in self-flagellation and were simply trying to find the strongest, safest, and easily repeatable way to create naturalism while acting.

So, nowadays, “The Method” technically refers to either Strasberg’s method of acting or the Stanislavsky method as a whole. (For some reason, Adler and Meisner have never been referred to as “the method…”) It is a method of safely (both for yourself and others) creating a naturalistic performance on the stage or screen.

But that’s not what most people mean when they talk about Jared Leto’s “method acting” antics. Let’s be clear – true method acting does not mean losing yourself in a role to the degree that you are no longer in control of your actions or that you are physically or emotionally hurting yourself or other people. It does not refer to any type of abuse.

So, where did this confusion come from? I’m not exactly sure, but my guess would be that some method actors have done some healthy things to stay in character (for example, perhaps telling the director they’d like to continue to speak in their character’s accent during filming because it’s tricky and it’ll be easier for them to do it well if they don’t stop and start…needing a few minutes to get into the right frame of mind before an emotional scene…etc.) but along the way, it got pushed further and further until the requests (or demands) were no longer recognizable as something that actually fit “the method” at all.

Deciding to keep an accent going between takes is WILDLY different than sending used condoms and rats to the personal homes of your coworkers in order to terrify them (as Leto did on “Suicide Squad,”) holding up shooting for hours so that you can continue playing a disabled person while you use the restroom “in character” (as he did on “Morbius”) or any of the other myriad of things we’ve heard about in the news. Leto is merely the (current) largest example. It stretches to the point where I have to ask…do these actors think they could only play Macbeth if they really murdered the actor playing Duncan? How far do some people want to push the line? And at what point will the entertainment community say enough is enough?

This is the dark flip side of the conversation: “should we only cast roles with actors who personally identify with those roles?” I think when it comes to things like underrepresented minorities – yes! We need more trans actors in trans roles! We can’t whitewash characters anymore. But there is a line. Many have accused Jared Leto of being a pedophile.

There is a doctored image going around (allegedly from the Hollywood Reporter and Yahoo! Entertainment) that Leto “wants to play a pedophile.” Especially considering most people took it in stride, that totally sounded like something Leto would say. It raises the question: where is the line? I don’t think (most people) feel that a pedophilic character can only be played by a real pedophile, or that a murderer can only be played by a real murderer, or that two lovers can only be played by actors who are really sleeping with each other, or even that you can only play an insomniac if you haven’t slept in two weeks.

There is a line that has to do with abuse, plain and simple. An acting “technique” (and I can’t put enough quotation marks around that) is not an excuse for any sort of abuse EVER. Leto has been known for trying to blur the lines with his performances and in real life.

In August 2019, while on an island retreat in Croatia for hundreds of fans (one of many such retreats,) Leto’s band Thirty Seconds To Mars tweeted, “Yes, it’s a cult.” Leto told New York Times Magazine that the whole thing was “a joke, a response to journalists saying, ‘You have such a cult following.’” But evidence has emerged (check out this article in Screenshot) that the band grew to actually behave in a disturbingly cult-like manner.

Is it a real cult, or a giant meta-joke? It’s the same debate we’re having about Leto’s acting techniques, and Joaquin Phoenix actually lying and jeopardizing his career to feed into a mockumentary, and Andy Kaufman’s abusive meta sketches and, and, and…it’s not funny in either circumstance.

And let’s not forget the number of sexual assault allegations against Leto – several of whom were/are from girls well under eighteen. Do you know what else is real-life sexual assault? Sending your fellow cast members used condoms.

Acting is a craft. There is a technique behind it. A performance needs to be safely repeatable. It is not an opportunity for a therapy session (yes, performing can be therapeutic, but that’s not what I mean…). It is not an opportunity to “act out,” and it is certainly not an excuse to be an awful person and get away with it.

I highly encourage everyone to become familiar with the real method acting – as a start, check out the great new book: “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act” by Isaac Butler. But don’t ever confuse an acting technique for an excuse to harm yourself and others.

That’s just bad form, plain and simple.

And as Olivier said, “You might try acting…” instead.