Natalie Portman has described method acting as a “luxury women can’t afford”, with the Oscar-winning actor saying she has never attempted it due to the impact it would have on her home life.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Portman, who trained as a ballet dancer for months ahead of her role in Black Swan, for which she won her Academy Award, said: “I’ve gotten very into roles, but I think it’s honestly a luxury that women can’t afford. 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.”
Method acting, a technique developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky and refined by US acting teachers, involves actors staying in character during production, sometimes to extreme lengths. It is most often aligned with male actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Andrew Garfield, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jeremy Strong and Jared Leto. The latter, who has been criticised for sending disgusting presents to his costars while in character as the Joker during the filming of Suicide Squad, made fun of his own reputation this week while presenting at the Golden Globe awards, saying: “I have been in presenter mode for weeks now.”
De Niro famously got a New York cab licence and drove a taxi for his role in Taxi Driver, and learned Italian and lived in Sicily for The Godfather Part II. Al Pacino pretended to be blind while making Scent of a Woman. DiCaprio ate raw bison liver and climbed inside a horse carcass during the filming of The Revenant. Shia LaBeouf pulled out one of his teeth during production of Fury, and Garfield stopped eating or having sex while playing a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.
Some actors are very against the technique. Last year, Succession’s Brian Cox revealed that he found his co-star Strong’s method acting “fucking annoying”.
“Don’t get me going on it … Strong is talented,” he added. “He’s fucking gifted. When you’ve got the gift, celebrate the gift. Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?”
Mads Mikkelsen has described method acting as “pretentious”, adding: “It’s bullshit. Preparation, you can take into insanity. What if it’s a shit film – what do you think you achieved?”
Some female actors have used method acting: Hilary Swank lived as a man for a month to play a transgender man in Boys Don’t Cry, while Lady Gaga claimed she stayed in character for 18 months while filming House of Gucci. More recently, Carey Mulligan told Variety she tried method acting techniques for the first time while playing Felicia Montealegre in Maestro, on the advice of her co-star and director Bradley Cooper, who stayed in character as Leonard Bernstein even while directing.
“He was like, ‘If you’re going to do this, you just have to fully, fully do it,’” Mulligan said. “When he said that, I was like, ‘OK, 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% able to just feel like I’m onstage and have that sense of ‘I don’t remember what happened.’”
