Should We Stop Reducing Actors To Their Method Acting Quirks?

Method acting is compelling, is it not? It’s something that almost everyone has an opinion on, especially since Jeremy Strong emerged as the technique’s unwilling poster child. 

Since Succession‘s premiere in 2018, Jeremy Strong’s Emmy-award winning performance of Kendall Roy has spurred a ton of discourse. Famously, in a 2021 New Yorker profile, Strong’s castmates Brian Cox and Kieran Culkin shared that Strong’s dedication to immersing himself entirely into Kendall’s psyche 24/7 has occasionally caused them concern. 

Despite the piece painting a compelling and overall pleasant portrait of the actor actor — his outraged celebrity friends (Jessica Chastain, anyone?) took to defending the actor when out-of-context profile quotes made him out to be unreasonable, selfish, or just generally unhinged. 

Famous Examples Of Actors Going Method

To me, the indignant reaction seemed less of a reaction to the comments themselves and more of an indictment on method acting’s spiky reputation. Traditionally known as the Stanislavski method, the technique is one where actors attempt to emulate the psyche of the characters they’re playing — often by living as if they are that character.

Famous examples are Robert DeNiro’s iconic turn in Taxi Driver, which he prepared for by driving around New York night after night without sleep. Another more recent example is Jamie Campbell Bower‘s prep for playing Vecna in Stranger Things 4 where he emulated Vecna’s insanity by locking himself alone in his apartment for days at a time and cruising the streets at 2am. Both are undoubtedly acclaimed performances, but it doesn’t make the behaviour any less alarming.

There are also plenty, shall we say, less lauded examples. Just look at Jared Leto’s performances in both Morbius and Suicide Squad. Or consider Ashton Kutcher’s hospitalisation for starvation after trying to live on Steve Jobs’ “fruitarian” diet in preparation for Jobs — a movie hardly anyone remembers and even fewer people saw. (RIP.) 

There are plenty of actors who denounce The Method, too. Mads Mikkelsen called the technique, “bullshit” and “just pretentious”. Robert Pattinson also pish-poshed The Method, pointing out, “I always say about people who do method acting, you only ever see people do the method when they’re playing an asshole.” And by way of a personal favourite, Toni Collette refer as “utter wankery.”

A Word On Kendall, I Mean… Jeremy Strong 

In a new interview with GQ, Jeremy Strong shares 10 things he can’t live without. For Strong these are books on the acting craft, a treasured vinyl, small trinkets from various roles, and LOTS of Kendall Roy paraphernalia; from Kendall’s custom sunglasses to his dry cleaning tags. 

Interestingly throughout the interview, Strong mostly uses “I” to describe things Kendall has done in Succession. “This tag was on my suit after I had gone into the water at my sister’s wedding,” he explains, describing the sequence in the Season 1 in which Kendall almost drowns at Shiv’s wedding after a car accident.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with an actor being passionate about their craft. But it is a little strange that in an exercise that is supposedly about explaining 10 things he cannot live without, Strong really only speaks of things that the fictional people he’s brought to life wouldn’t have been brought to life without.

Strong himself acknowledges this rather poetically, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, so these feel like fragments of lives I’ve walked through, and this is all that’s left of any of them.”  

Towards the end of the interview, Strong’s explanation of his favourite books provide the insight most independent from his role as Kendall. Some of the titles include, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust (of course it is) and My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgård, which is “Number one for me,” he says – explaining how both books helped him through the chaos and penniless struggles of his 20s.

These last five minutes of the interview, in which Strong shares small details of his life including his home in Denmark and his penchant for composing classical music – do far more to present him as a well-rounded person who’s just good at their job than any tweets from his celebrity friends. Perhaps this, the flattening of an actor’s life and skills into a single character for the sake of marketing their craft, is among the most frustrating effects of pop culture’s obsession with The Method.

There are extreme examples of this effect. As a life-long fan of Heath Ledger (I still have A Knight’s Tale recorded on VHS), nothing frustrates me more than the mythologising of his accidental death as a result of his immersive performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight, despite his death occurring months after the film’s completion. For many, this is how Ledger is remembered — while very little attention is given to his LGBT rights advocacy, passion for Australian cinema, or his family.

Even when it comes to the best intentioned Method actors like Jeremy Strong, Method acting is still ultimately a reductive and uncomfortable way to view a person’s work. The Method also leaves little room to remember that making movies and TV is always a group effort. Not to mention, the gratuitous celebration of it in popular culture subtly implies actors who don’t “method” are less dedicated to their craft. 

Quality performance is the work of a person in a brief series of moments that their entire life prepared them for, but the culture continuously reduces an actor’s personhood to these moments and at this point, it’s getting kind of dull to say the least.