Movie News

There's method in Daniel's madness

Mon 14 Jan 12:20 PM

Daniel Day-Lewis has claimed that the methods he adopts to get into character for his roles have been misrepresented in the press.

The actor – who locked himself up and was hosed down with freezing water to prepare for his role in The Name of The Father, in which he played a man wrongly imprisoned for being an IRA terrorist – told Empire magazine: "People think I'm some form of sophisticated sadomasochism most of the time, but that's not my experience at all. It is a thoroughly joyful thing to work.

"If you are trying to imagine a world, you use whatever means you can to stimulate the imagination. That's the basis of method acting."

In the actor's new film, There Will Be Blood, he plays ruthless oil prospector Daniel Plainview at the turn of the 20th century, a performance for which he has been uniformly praised.