Natalie Portman is one of the best actresses of her generation—her Best Actress Oscar is proof of that statement. But even one of the best actresses of her generation still isn’t afforded all of the opportunities an actor is, she told The Wall Street Journal Magazine.
Case in point: Method acting, where actors embody the character they are playing, not just onscreen, but off, too. (Think a full immersive experience where the actor doesn’t switch from playing XYZ character when the director yells “cut”; rather, they stay in character all the time. Daniel Day-Lewis is an example of a Method practitioner.) It’s a form of acting that Portman said she’s never employed, and for good reason—one that most other actresses can relate to.
“I’ve gotten very into roles, but I think it’s honestly a luxury that women can’t afford,” she told the publication. “I don’t think that children or partners would be very understanding of, you know, me making everyone call me ‘Jackie Kennedy’ all the time.” (Portman is alluding to her turn as the former First Lady in 2016’s Jackie.)
Portman said that going full Method actor wouldn’t align with her role as a mother (she shares two children with Benjamin Millepied). Now, don’t think Portman doesn’t prepare for her roles—she does. Take her Academy Award-winning role in 2010’s Black Swan, which was, coincidentally, where she met Millepied, who is a dancer and a choreographer. For the film, she trained as a ballet dancer for months to get into character, Variety reports, “even going to far as to reshape her diet to just almonds and carrots.” But after the day on set ends, Portman goes back to being herself, not the character she’s embodying at the time.
Portman’s comments about actresses and Method acting follow recent comments from Carey Mulligan, who never tried the technique until her recent role in Maestro. “There was a part of me as an actor that always felt like, ‘Well, I’m never going to be one of those actors that keeps their dialect in between takes,’” she told Variety. “There was a part of me that was slightly held back, or maybe nervous of completely committing to something. But that was what Bradley [Cooper, who directed and starred in the film] asked, basically, at the beginning of the process. He was like, ‘If you’re going to do this, you just have to fully, fully do it.’ When he said that, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to absolutely do it all.’ I’m going to do all the research. I’m going to do all the dialect stuff. I’m going to do everything, so that when I get on set, I am 100 percent able to just feel like I’m onstage and have that sense of ‘I don’t remember what happened.’”
Cooper, Variety reports, “is well-known for staying in character during production and adopted Method acting techniques, as are other male actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Jared Leto, and Jeremy Strong. Jared Leto’s reputation as a Method actor is so ubiquitous that he recently mocked himself while presenting at the 2024 Golden Globes.”
Leto weighed in on his process, telling Variety “And it could also be really pretentious as well. I was thinking of it as my job to show up and do the best work that I can. It’s my job to show up, do whatever I can, to be over-prepared. And to deliver. It’s also my job to show up and, you know, be a pleasure to work with. And to be collaborative, and to have a good experience on set.” (It’s worth noting here that Leto does not have kids, nor is he married.)
Andrew Garfield—who also isn’t married, nor does he have kids—went Method for his role in Martin Scorsese’s Silence by depriving himself of food and sex to play a Jesuit priest. He said that “there [have] been a lot of misconceptions about what Method acting is, I think. People are still acting in that way, and it’s not about being an asshole to everyone on set. It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”
This is not to say that only men who aren’t married and don’t have kids can employ this technique—but Portman has a point, and it’s one that extends to other industries, as well. While having a family and responsibilities outside of work is beautiful—no question about it—there is a cost to everything, a fact most women know all too well.
