Has Method acting become the Frankenstein’s monster of Hollywood?

As we head into Hollywood awards season, a wry saying springs to mind: the award doesn’t go to the person who did the best acting, but the person who did the MOST acting. And at the moment, it certainly feels like there’s a lot of acting going on.

There’s something highly entertaining about reading the bonkers things actors will do to try and lose themselves in a role. Are they just sharing their process? Are they self-mythologising? Whatever it is, knowing they’ve done something puritanical or eccentric to Become The Character might make us view their performance with a new level of respect – or, at least, morbid intrigue.

Right now we seem to be spoilt for enjoyably silly anecdotes. There was the viral New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong that revealed he’d "begged" Aaron Sorkin to spray him with tear gas on The Trial of Chicago 7. At one point, Strong admitted one of his interview answers had been “coloured by" his Succession character, Kendall. “I began to wonder if I’d been interviewing an actor playing Kendall Roy or a character impersonating Jeremy Strong,” wrote the journalist, Michael Schulman. Meanwhile, on the set of Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, Lady Gaga apparently spoke in an Italian accent for nine months, while her co-star and notorious Method acting troll Jared Leto joked (we think) that he “climbed into that creative cave and came out through the bowels and intestines into the oesophagus of the one and only Paolo Gucci.”

And for several months, Benedict Cumberbatch has been horse whispering award juries with tales of his process on Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which included not washing, giving himself nicotine poisoning, and not answering to his own name. Discussing shooting his final scene, he said, “I looked up and I was surrounded by the crew with champagne and candles and they were raising a glass to say goodbye to him and hello to me because they hadn’t met me! I’d been the character with them for every minute.”

The shorthand way that we would refer to all of the above, perhaps a little teasingly, would be ‘going full Method’. But over the course of the last century, Method acting has been somewhat muddled with the idea that it’s all about chopping wood alone in a forest or shaving off your eyebrows. “There’s an interesting disconnect between what the public thinks The Method is, and what acting teachers and experts would tell you The Method is,” says Isaac Butler, the author of new book The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned How to Act, an entertaining history of perhaps the most influential – but also misunderstood – technique in a modern actor’s toolkit.

The Method was developed in the 1930s by Lee Strasberg, based on earlier ideas by Konstantin Stanislavski, the forefather of modern theories about acting. Famous students such as Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, James Dean and Jane Fonda learned “a series of exercises and techniques that were about unlocking the individual actor, moving them away from clichéd, standardised behaviour and into their own real idiosyncrasies, to allow them to enter the imagined reality of the character – to bring themselves and the character together,” explains Butler.

It became the in-house technique of the prestigious Actors Studio, which became so influential at one point that in 1979, nine out of the ten acting nominations at the Oscars were Actors Studio members. And it was incredibly mentally demanding. “Even Lee Strasberg’s biggest fans would say things like, ‘don’t study with Lee unless you’ve got your house in order psychologically, because he demands every last bit of your inner being.”

But Stella Adler, another acting teacher building on the ideas of Stanislavski, took The Method in a new, more outwardly transformational direction. Her most famous student, Robert De Niro, pushed these ideas as far as he could – his work in Raging Bull, where he learned to box, radically changed his body and wore prosthetics, is widely seen as the most influential performance in this style. This in turn informed Daniel Day-Lewis, who is infamous for his intensely immersive preparation.

It’s this version of The Method that has become notorious as an unsubtle form of Oscar-bait, largely because the highly visible, easily explainable process usually makes for good PR. This kind of technique can involve “incredibly in-depth research - you buy clothes that are like your character’s clothes, you learn how to talk like your character, you maybe adopt their training regimen, or you gain or lose some weight. You want to experience as much of the lived reality of the character externally as possible,” says Butler. In short, it’s the kind of stuff that summons the much-quoted Laurence Olivier line: “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”

It might sound like The-Method-that-you-thought-was-The-Method is the more extreme version, but the purer, more internalised form of the technique can still be overpowering. Butler, who originally trained as an actor before becoming a writer and director, learned this first hand. In a class, asked to bring in an object of emotional significance, he brought in the obituary of a friend who had died of Aids the year before. “It just unleashed something in me where I just couldn’t control it – I was sobbing uncontrollably, I was gasping for air,” he says. “That was my first experience with the idea that you could open these emotions up and trigger them and then not know what to do with them.” Later, he performed in a play at college that basically required him to chain smoke and have a nervous breakdown for 90 minutes. In the book, he writes that he would have to go home and stare at the wall for long stretches of time afterwards in order to try and escape the dark place it put him in.

“We think of actors as very fragile but they’re actually very tough, because they have to be able to turn this stuff on and off and go to these places, and then walk back from them,” he says.

This is a particularly hot moment for discussions of acting. Butler thinks that’s in part because we’ve spent so much time over the past year being unable to do little but watch TV. But it’s also to do with the fact that workplace safety is now much higher on the agenda. There is, of course, a huge difference between acting processes that your castmates find unhelpful and uncollaborative, and those that become an excuse for genuinely inappropriate behaviour. Dustin Hoffman famously slapped Meryl Streep in Kramer vs Kramer; more recently, Jared Leto attracted consternation for apparently sending used condoms and dead animals to his castmates when he played the Joker in Suicide Squad (he later backtracked, saying that “any of the very few gifts that were ever given were given with a spirit of fun and adventure and received with laughter, fun, and adventure.”).

We’re seeing “a well overdue renegotiation of the norms of on-set behaviour, particularly from men,” Butler says. “The kind of stories that used to make us go, ‘oh, wow, what a brilliant actor, they really take this so seriously, they’re willing to do anything for their art’ now make us go, ‘is that abuse?’ We’re asking different questions, in a way that I think is really needed.”

While there have been great Method actresses – Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn and Eva Marie Saint are just a few of Butler’s examples – the more outward, transformational version generally tends to focus on whether they have “uglied up”. Just look at Jessica Chastain’s dogged hours in the make-up chair to render herself unrecognisable as Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. But the stories of actresses throwing their weight around on set in the name of a role are, unsurprisingly, hard to find.

“I just don’t think women can get away with it. We don’t really love it when artists of any stripe take themselves too seriously. We especially don’t like it when women take themselves too seriously, “ says Butler. “I really do think it has to do with our gender expectations of what people are and aren’t allowed to do. I would love it if maybe someday Toni Collette was just like, screw it, I’m gonna do this weird stuff and be in character all the time. But yeah, I just think gendered power dynamics make that very hard.”

So what of the future of The Method? Acting styles change, and The Method’s values of “real life and capital T truth” are, Butler says, nowhere near as dominant these days. “We live in a time where there’s a much greater diversity of approach and theory and style, which I think is great. It’s wonderful that we have actors like Tilda Swinton or Olivia Colman who are capable of doing these big, very strange performances. And then we have more realistic actors too, we have someone of the titanic power of Viola Davis, but we also have old fashioned character actor comedians too.” says Butler.

What he hopes we don’t lose is “the place for complexity and for the mystery of the human being”, in the race to make work that prioritises being clear. That mystery is, after all, part of the reason we’re still so fascinated by the business of acting; the Method lets us observe that strange, mystical alchemy of an actor and a character fusing together, never quite sure where one begins and the other ends.

The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned How to Act by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury USA, £30) is available for pre-order