The Problem of Method Acting

this video is sponsored by hellofresh i will never again reach the level of discipline that i imposed on myself as a teenager in art school with my ambitions high and my childhood optimism living out its final days i spent my four years as a drama major tirelessly honing my craft i scoffed at my ambivalent peers and sobbed in the bathroom when i didn't land a roll whenever i cried at home i would stand in front of the mirror and recite my favorite monologue from my earliest days at the school i came to understand art as the chronic opening of an unhealed wound my intensity was in part a manifestation of my own teenage desire for validation and respect but it was also in part a product of the trauma reward feedback loop that permeated the culture of my school in grade nine i performed a slice of life monologue based on a girl i had observed at the mall and delivered my final lines through shaking sobs i finished her rapturous applause with no memory of the performance and felt euphoric in grade 11 we were asked to submit a diary entry about a secret we have been keeping i wrote about my depression and the feeling of being changed to the bottom of my own mind my teacher later told me she read it to her senior class as an exemplary submission this made me feel important in grade 12 my creative writing teacher asked us to pen a personal anecdote about our lives and presented out loud to our peers most people cried during their presentations and with the guide of our teacher the class would sigh in collective catharsis i wrote about how proud i was of my dad and ended the presentation again in tears i wanted to prove that i was serious about writing it was the only a i received in that course from a teacher who otherwise took little interest in me i wouldn't trade my time at that school for anything while many have gone on to bemoan their experiences there i feel privileged to have had the opportunity to explore an art without real world constraints my adult years were a difficult adjustment because i lost my creative outlet acting had been a form of what i felt to be therapy a place where i could tear open my heart and receive praise for it but over the past couple years through self-reflection and conversations with friends i've come to terms with how exploitative the culture of our school could sometimes be how prejudice has crept up through the institution and disadvantaged certain students how some teachers sapped from our young traumas and used them in their quest to find validation and respect in their own lives and careers the culture of my high school did not exist in a vacuum the discomforting and spectacular mixture of art and pain is something that's long been venerated in western society from van gogh to kalo to hemingway we tend to understand art as this great release and expression of pain an exorcism of inner demons turned into a magnum opus for reverent beholders the painless i think the most insidious and mainstream version of this duality in art comes around award season you know when the media outlets start spinning stories about the ridiculous process that an actor underwent to prepare for a role and then we all kind of laugh about it and we're like they must have really wanted that oscar you've heard it before he lost himself in that role or as the saying goes he went method the method which is an acting technique that's popularly understood as an actor's total personal devotion to a character is one of the most simultaneously beloved and maligned practices of the acting world in popular culture it's almost commonplace to associate the method with good acting but no one can really agree upon what the method really is at this rate anything from just researching a role to needing therapy to get out of a role is considered method you've seen the listicles five method actors who almost died for a role ten times method acting went too far and the list includes natalie portman learning ballet intermingled with daniel day-lewis catching pneumonia for refusing to wear a contemporary winter coat on the set of gangs of new york it's gotten to the point where we've stopped questioning why we think the method is good which has culminated in a pretty destructive culture for the world of film acting maybe it's time someone deigns to say it or maybe it's time iodine to say it method acting does not necessarily a great actor make these days it kind of goes without saying that acting requires some degree of empathy with the character but this concept wasn't always a linchpin of the craft actually it was brought about in the late 19th century by theater practitioner konstantin stanislavski in his observations of theater rehearsals stanislavski found russian stage acting at this time to be distilted and dispassionate describing one rehearsal he wrote the director sat on the fourth stage and gave his instructions to the cast what should i do here asked one actor sit on the sofa the director answers and what should i be doing asks another you are nervous ring your hands and walk up and down the director orders can't i sit down the actor persists how can you possibly sit down when you are nervous replies to bewildered director stanislavski identified that a truly believable performance requires a degree of realism which is impossible when an actor's every move is micromanaged by a director so he developed a praxis for actors that would allow them to conjure up organic emotions and movements on stage he called this praxis the system building upon russian theatrical realism brought about in the earlier 19th century by actors like mikhail shepkin he sought to create a grammar of acting a basic set of techniques and exercises that would allow the actor to develop an inner life rather than just imitating external life this process would allow an actor to breathe life into their character and react organically in the moment to their scene partners over the years stanislavski constantly reworked and built upon his ideas acknowledging that the craft of acting can never be confined to a set of immutable rules but since his ideas were changing so frequently by the end of his life they were widely misinterpreted as they traveled overseas the system was originally taken to the west by actors from the moscow art theatre but by the time it got there it had already been updated multiple times over perhaps the most prominent people to bring stanislavski's ideas to the us was richard bolaslovski a mentor to a number of the people who would go on to invent the method most prominently stella adler and lee strasberg in 1931 these two along with harold clermon and cheryl crawford founded a revolutionary new york city-based theater collective called the group theater later evolving into the actors studio which is still in operation today under the purview of alec baldwin ellen burstin and al pacino now it's important to note that stanislavski's system was equal parts internal and external with the external emphasizing things like relaxation vocal techniques and physical expressiveness and it was these aspects of his teachings that would be muddied once they reached the us what did carry over were the internal aspects most notably the practice of emotion memory not every founder of the method relied solely on this practice stella adler famously leaned more heavily into the physical aspects of stanislavski's work whereas lee strasberg was almost puritanical in his insistence on the psychological this would cause a massive schism between adler who was reverent towards stanislavski and strasberg who upon meeting stanislavski showed very little respect for his work according to stella adler strasberg said we do it better than you he was a man of great arrogance basically the strasbourgian method iterations of which you see making headlines today is a distortion of stanislavski's theory of emotion memory stanislavski's early usage of the system was created to teach lesser-known actors how to act and it partially relied on a technique where an actor draws from their personal reservoir of memories to lend a bit of human truth to a performance but this was quickly dropped by stanislavski because he viewed it only as a last resort and found that his students who were employing it too heavily were experiencing mental problems as jean benedetti explains in his comprehensive history of stanislavski in reading a play an actor is called on to fill it out with his own memories and experiences to give it human depth by his own personal involvement through emotion memory all too often however the evocation of past experiences produced negative results tension exhaustion sometimes hysteria at other times the mind seized up refusing to yield up its secrets stanislavski had always been aware of how carefully the evocation of emotion had to be handled the unconscious cannot be commanded feelings have to be lured enticed now it seemed to him that any kind of direct attempt to evoke feeling or the memory of feeling had to be avoided just as it was wrong for an actor to be assaulted by a battery of outside fact and knowledge so it was wrong for him to assault his own emotions so you can see how stanislavski was already worried about the implications that this practice would have for the actor and to the people around them luckily strasbourg made an entire career out of it strasbourg's version of the system which he called the method is essentially a series of exercises born out of emotion memory he called it emotional recall where an actor literally recalls a memory that happened seven years or more before the time of performance and uses it to feel the emotions of a character they were also pushed to live and breathe that character and to write out full biographies of the character's life before and after the given circumstances of a scene for strasbourg it was all about producing consistent performances and heightening the actor's awareness of self this was also around the time that the ideas of sigmund freud and psychotherapy were entering the american public vernacular according to scott balzer's act reborn in an era of increased psychotherapy strasbourg's focus on sense and affective memory was stanislavski narrowed down to a quasi-freudian inner working fueled by an obsession with the self where stanislavski's system was created for burgeoning or amateur actors strasberg's was developed with big stars in mind for example when stella adler's muse marlon brando came to prominence for his groundbreaking performance in a streetcar named desire strasbourg took credit for it while strasbourg's iteration of the method is commonly used in hollywood today it's pretty maligned in the world of theater academia of course i'm no professional nor did i attend post-secondary acting school so i brought in my friend ellie to give her perspective on the method and how it's received in theater academia ellie's been acting in the film industry since she was eight and she attended canada's prestigious national theater school she also attended high school with me and i can definitely say she was one of the best actors in our year if not the best what was great about nts i found was that there was this emphasis on exposing um students to like a variety of different methods and pedagogies and genres um and you know pieces of art from various countries and eras so there really isn't this one um method that the school subscribes to and uh delivers to their students really i think the overall pedagogy is like um a variety of exposure i think honestly the most like concrete and useful tools that i got from school were um related to script work and were related to like analyzing text and story and that's actually served me best in my career so far in the realm of like the industry of just of working actors people who go between film and television and theater and uh just our kind of your regular day-to-day canadian working actors this concept of method acting is not really something that is a very um practical part of anyone's process it's just not realistic uh you know the budgets aren't high enough you're not famous enough to get away with some of the stuff that is typically practiced in method acting like it's just not something that plays into a practical um working actor life like at all i really feel like i do my best acting work when my personal life is very stable and very consistent and something i've always felt is that i'm able to experiment and do the most extreme things in my art when i'm the most stable internally and know that i have something to come back to like safe and i found that in projects and doing plays and film like if the if i feel safe in an environment too um then i'm able to do way more interesting stuff i'm able to go places with my imagination that are much darker actually uh because it allows me to you know to risk more because i know that i i have some stability to return to in his book succinctly called acting john harrop like ellie takes a pretty critical position on the method he says emotion memory is essentially secondhand it uses emotion that is stimulated by a circumstance other than that of the play's immediate action it introduces an emotional non-sequitur into a performance it can produce irrelevance the actor is involved with the past situation of his or her own rather than responding to the action of the present he goes on to say the creation of biographies can weigh the actor down with all manner of irrelevancies and lead to spending performance time filling out the life of the character rather than energetically pursuing the character's action as given in the script for a lot of critics strasbourg's method does almost the exact opposite of what stanislavski set out to do rather than allowing the actor to live in the moment and fully embody the character it takes them right out of a scene and into their own heads bogging them down with the details of their own selfhood as karen hollinger points out the method arguably created an acting style that largely celebrated the neuroses of the individual performer fed the star system by its strong emphasis on the actor's personality and created a cult-like atmosphere of director worship by its idolization of strasbourg which brings me to my next section [Music] although award ceremonies really add a level of glitz and glam to the business you might be surprised to know that film hasn't always had the prestige that it does today actually in its earlier years it was considered low culture as cynthia baron and sharon marie carnegie state live stage performance has been associated with legitimacy complexity and authenticity while screen performance has often been viewed as something other than true acting theater actors had only their skills and the momentum of a scene to rely on whereas film actors had the help of lighting framing and editing they had multiple tries to get it right and a director who could instruct them at every turn and to a degree it's true stage and screen acting are super different on stage every moment is informed by the one that came before it you're living the scene and bouncing off the energy of your scene partners but with film oftentimes you're isolated on camera and forced to conjure up the moment only after someone yells action so you can see why screen actors were so allured by the method strasbourg promised that you could replicate and turn on a single emotion again and again and again for each take in film you know sometimes you're shooting things out of sequence you um your the day is like broken up sometimes you'll have to shoot your close-up and the person that you're reacting to actually leaves set and isn't even there so you don't have them to read they're just in those situations i do understand why you and and i've used them myself like you know this concept of substitution where you would use a memory or an emotional recall from your personal life because you just need to get to an emotional place so that the story is clear and you have a direction and something is written into the script and you need to achieve it and you've got two takes to do it and you will just have to bring that up and make it happen and it's very results-based um so in those instances i do understand acting unlike painting or dancing is an intangible art form an actor can spend years honing their skill and still struggle to convey a particular emotion or empathize with a particular character the value we place on acting is measured mostly through archaic institutions like the motion picture academy which offers a very constrained view on what good acting looks like it's for this reason that actors feel compelled to prove to their audience that they've put themselves through something in dedication to their craft this isn't a new concept art and suffering have always operated in tandem with each other kurt cobain was suffocated by his depression but he created transformative music billy holliday lived a very troubled life of abject poverty and abuse but the pain in her voice when she sings solitude is immeasurable and moving francisco de goya also suffered chronically from deteriorating mental health but he left us with some of the most haunting masterpieces in the western canon it's dangerous to venerate art as this transaction in exchange for a creator's well-being but that's how we've chosen to value creativity for centuries we've bestowed importance on art by mythologizing the process through which it was created and we love to mythologize suffering the venn diagram of talent genius creativity pain and insanity is as old as time in the ion plato socrates says for the poet is a light and winged and holy thing and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer with him when he is not attained to this state he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles here he speaks of creativity as a divine thing born out of madness what makes the method feel a bit perverse is that it's become a sort of rulebook for the actor to facilitate their own suffering like a repertoire of painful memories that can be accessed at any time i don't think any art should be measured or venerated based on how much an artist has suffered in their life and i definitely don't think any artist should be trained to self-impose that suffering or turn it on and off like a switch gary oldman for example who's one of the most renowned actors of our time used to talk about carrying around a pain bag with him to set which held a bunch of memorabilia that conjured up terrible memories when an interviewer in a 2012 article for gq questioned him on this and asked because everyone likes a tormented actor he said you've got to be kind of crazy haven't you i've played it up a bit method acting has become a ritual for bearing the scars of self-imposed suffering in the name of art or at least boasting about it it's a means of bestowing legitimacy on an underappreciated art form an art form that some have characterized as [ __ ] [Music] 2016 was a bit of an embarrassing year for the legacy of method acting in an attempt to give weight to his doomed performance as the joker in suicide squad jared leto had reportedly sent his co-stars an array of gifts that ranged from condoms to a live rat to a dead pig he also spent time on the dark web watching grisly crime footage the director david ayer was nothing short of reverent towards leto's antics the joker is something you have to be and you can see how exhausting and painful it is for him to be this character yet the only pain experienced here was by his disgruntled co-stars and audiences who had to sit through letto's mediocre performance but not all performances that year were bad it was the year leonardo dicaprio won a long-awaited oscar for the revenant but this also came with its own ridiculous stories during awards season the buzz was that leo a long time vegetarian had apparently eaten raw bison in preparation for his role as frontiersman hugh glass he also put himself through freezing temperatures under the threat of hypothermia and opted to sleep in an animal carcass you know there's a lot of things that i do in this movie whether it be sleeping in an animal carcass or falling off of cliffs or going down frozen roaring rapids or fighting with tom hardy or a bear for example i mean you you name it so just like give him the [ __ ] oscar or something i don't know both leto and leo's desperate antics well particularly embarrassing fall into a long tradition of male method actors attempting to mythologize themselves in pursuit of prestige the litany of stories about these guys doing weird stuff on set is endless daniel day-lewis gets pneumonia and prepper gangs of new york builds a house 17th century style and refuses to shower for the crucible stays in character as abraham lincoln for the seven months it took to film lincoln and uses a wheelchair demanding to be spoon-fed for my left foot tom hanks refuses to shower and gets a staph infection for castaway and also yells in character as a prison guard at stephen king on the side of the green mile leonardo dicaprio cuts his hands slamming a glass and django unchained and wipes his blood on carrie washington's face this take is in the movie al pacino poses as a cop and threatens to arrest a truck driver for serpico and acts blind on the set of scent of a woman by stumbling over things and refusing to look as co-stars in the eye while cameras weren't rolling johnny depp lives in hunter s thompson's basement and smokes next two gun barrels for fear and loathing in las vegas nicolas cage eats a cockroach for a vampire's kiss and pulls out his own teeth for birdie gary oldman smokes thirty thousand dollars worth of cigars for darkest hour and develops stomach issues from it jared leto lives on the streets for requiem for a dream and gives himself a go for chapter 27 shia labeouf drops acid for charlie countryman stays drunk on moonshine for lawless submits a personal sex tape as his audition for nymphomaniac and refuses to shower for fury which grosses out brad pitt edward norton punches brad pitt for fight club sean penn just straight up assaults john lombizamo on camera for casualties of war dustin hoffman makes fun of meryl streep's recently deceased boyfriend john cazale and slaps her in the face for kramer vs kramer and then doesn't sleep for 72 hours for marathon man which earns him a well-deserved roasting by acting that lawrence olivier who allegedly asked him my dear boy why don't you just try acting it's so much easier [Music] what you'll notice on any famous method acting list is that the actors from hollywood are overwhelmingly white men non-white actors who do make it into the canon like dilip kumar or choiman sick are typically not from hollywood ironically the black actors from hollywood who do make it to the lists are two of a mere four black men to win an oscar for a leading role forrest whitaker pops up now and again because he gained 30 pounds and learned to speak swahili when he played idi amin in the last king of scotland for which he won his oscar jamie foxx had to receive therapy after diving too deep into a role for the soloist and glued his eyes shut during the filming of rey a role for which he again won his oscar i can't say that forest whitaker gaining weight and doing preliminary research necessarily qualifies as going method but you can see how he and jamie foxx's acting processes were mythologized once they were formally recognized by the institution whitaker and fox continue to stand out starkly against their white male counterparts this also isn't to say that female actors or bipoc female actors haven't ascribed to the method or studied under its mentors it's more so that its legacy has passed through the hands of white cis men this might be because the method is rooted in the ideals of american individualism and bruce masculinity beginning with marlon brando's rugged sexuality and blatant almost explosive working-class machismo in a streetcar named desire followed by james dean's tortured and brooding portrayals in rebel without a cause and east of eden it was clear that a new type of mid-century masculinity was taking over hollywood and with their acclaim brando and dean both of whom were method actors helped to bring the method to mainstream attention as hollinger states the method early became associated with male rebel heroes whose anti-social behavior inner disturbance emotional repression and personal anguish came to be seen as authentic and distinctly masculine people like brando dean and montgomery clift exuded a type of masculinity that was complicated and sexually potent or in the words of hollinger they exuded a tension between an outer mask of stoic strength and self-control and an inner emotional core constantly on the verge of breaking through in the form of violent outburst they paved the way for later method actors like robert de niro al pacino dustin hoffman and jack nicholson all of whom are still some of the most renowned actors in hollywood and all of whom were known for portraying brooding repressed and or latently masculine characters but while their on-screen performances are legendary their off-screen antics reveal the true tension of acting that is the tension between job and art the beauty of stage performance is in its communality everyone is working together to create this transcendent experience with an art form stanislavski understood this the actor's expression of their inner self would allow them to move comfortably about the stage and engage organically with their scene partners but the method with its decidedly masculine sensibility is bound to the ideals of american individualism the actor is priority above all else screen acting may be more isolated and mediated than stage acting but it's still a group effort hundreds and hundreds of people surround the actors working together to make them look good to make their own version of transcendent art is dustin hoffman thinking of a scene partner meryl streep when he allegedly took out his angst against his own ex-wife by making jeers about john cassell's death was leo thinking about carrie washington when he wiped his own fluids on her face or was jim carrey thinking of the people working tirelessly on man on the moon when he berated and harassed them on set claiming to be possessed by andy kaufman the method when it's employed by male stars in their desperation to self-mythologize becomes a cult of the individual actor as harop reflects this was not what stanislavski had in mind when calling for a greater concern within her process but it was splendidly consonant with the idea that the concerns of the individual in society are primary and what is most real and interesting about the individual is his or her personal feelings not only does strasbourg's insistence on mind over body prioritize the self of the actor it also served as an american rejection of stanislavski's ethos its peddling of rugged individualism and self-worship was a way for male actors to justify their choice of a [ __ ] career what better way to show the non-believers that my job is in fact not [ __ ] than to treat my self-imposed fruit labor like a rite of passage christian bale rejects his [ __ ] image by attempting to demonstrate startling control over his body jumping from emaciated to muscly to portly in the blink of an eye jim carrey convinces us of his devotion to acting by swearing he was possessed by andy kaufman relinquishing control of his actions and a touch of divine madness leo isn't a pretty boy anymore because he gave himself hypothermia for no reason in a scathing 2016 article for the atlantic angelica jade bastian says by going method a performer can signal that he works for his art he can make his labor visible she compares the ways that actors like leonardo dicaprio were discussed versus an actor like brad pitt in the 90s both leo and pitt were considered golden boys the certifiable dreamboats of hollywood but leo was able to diverge from this title when he started going method proving to audiences and critics that he was a real actor pitt on the other hand who delivers equally impressive performances has seldom gained the same level of reverence bastian says pitt isn't often praised as a great actor and it's not because he doesn't have the scenes to prove it rather he has an ease and ability to use his personality to inform his work in a way that recalls the greats of classic hollywood like cary grant who didn't believe acting needed to be a painfully realistic reflection of the world personally i found leo's later performances to be a bit overwrought and predictable brad pitt on the other hand always manages to surprise me with his command over text and his subtle shifts and persona but that's just me so if the method has become something that's championed by male actors what does that look like when it's employed by female method actors or when a regular female actor comes into contact with it [Music] we can trace the patriarchal roots of the method all the way back to stanislavski himself who while being progressive in many senses of the word also carried with him the misogynistic values of his time in her book stanislavski in focus sharon marie carnegie makes note of the way he approached women under his tutelage she observes when he catches his class taking his advice about truth and logical behavior too far he makes an example of women to prove that too hardy a demand for truthful actions can be detrimental he asks them to walk up and down the hall faulting their every move calling each step false until they collapse in tears when he describes how the use of a personal emotion on the stage can be harmful to the psyche of an actor he chooses a woman's memory to explore his women's students often cry flirt show off on stage respond best to scenes that feature maternal love in short they are drawn from stereotypical images in an early feminist critique of the method called the female actor prepares linda walsh jenkins and susan ogden malou phrase a similar concern about stereotyping noting when the roles in which people believe the ways in which they are taught belief and the process by which they rehearse belief are closed to gender consciousness and commentary the situation is unhealthy they then take the argument further by saying the acting coach or director frequently serves as an all-knowing guru for whom the performer must be absolutely vulnerable opening the way to both psychological and sexual exploitation it's common and method acting for a female actor to be the muse of some greater mind marilyn monroe was incredibly close with lee strasberg when she saw to be taken more seriously as an actress in a 2003 memoir about lee and merelyn's relationship journalist and actress patricia ballsworth recounted marilyn would take the elevator to lee's where he would guide her in a series of sense-memory exercises in which she acted like a child in an effort to get in touch with her real self her real tragic power do this exercise and you'll feel something he would tell marilyn and she believed him because she needed to for marilyn monroe was not often in touch with how she felt she would struggle mightily to release emotional and physical blocks as she recalls one of her most disturbing childhood memories the time a relative tried to suffocate her with a pillow but the pain of recalling those early years as norma jean baker the abandoned and abused child was excruciating marilyn confided to susan strasberg that occasionally when these questions became too probing she would just make something up in bosworth size lee offered marilyn respect as an actress and she offered him a ticket to fame and celebrity she's careful to note though that strasbourg and his wife paula also held marilyn back in many ways she says marilyn never lost her terror of being on a movie set because paula continually forced her to reach down for her real self in monroe's case that meant not only norma jean the abused orphan child but also marilyn the blonde wiggly sex symbol lee's relationship to her was less so of an acting mentor than a father figure to someone who was clearly stunted by childhood trauma he took on the role all too willingly drawing from her trauma to make a name for himself out of his proximity to her men have often positioned themselves as gurus of the method attempting to wean good performances out of women otto preminger tormented gene seberg during their brief working relationship and allowed her to be burned by fire during the execution scene in saint joan the take of her yelling and real anguish was left in the film alfred hitchcock frequently terrorized tipi hendren while filming the birds as did stanley kubrick with shelley duvall on the set of the shining perhaps most deplorable was when bernardo bertolucci and marlon brando conspired to withhold from 19 year old maria schneider that they would be using butter on her during the rape scene in las tango in paris the sexual humiliation that schneider felt during this moment and in the years after the film's release would have a devastating impact on her life bertalucci maintained until he died that the information was withheld to get a more realistic reaction from schneider all of these moments demonstrate the shadow that method acting has cast over the film industry whether or not these directors or mentors even ascribed to the method isn't the point the point is that the industry's dogged commitment to realism led to a mistrust in the talent of actors particularly women and it gave way to outright abuse in the name of art the non-method acting woman's body became a conduit for the guru's ego and even his own twisted sexual fantasies none of the female actors i've mentioned so far aside from marilyn considered themselves method actors but there are actually quite a number of female actors who did ascribe to it jane fonda ellen burstin kim hunter geraldine page and bancroft joanne woodward scarlett johansson and laura dern to name a few all study the method but you rarely hear about them terrorizing co-stars or crew members there's really no mythology around them at all they just do the job when a woman does make it to the method acting has gone too far lists it's usually about a drastic change in her physical appearance rather than her on and off set behavior charlie's therin looks so much uglier in monster hillary swank bound her chest and cut her hair for boys don't cry actually some of the most acclaimed female actors of the 20th and 21st centuries don't associate themselves with the method at all you just can't go you know on the set and just go okay i'm gonna go hog wild cause the character is going wild he just punches a wall in with his with his bare fist so i'm gonna do it and then walk away with broken fingers i don't want broken fingers i just want to show you that it looks like i'm breaking my fingers so it's um technique craft is what allows me to leave it behind and go home to my husband and my child jody foster famously rejects it saying if anything what i do is by instinct my method is just do what i think is right i don't think you have to feel the character and research it for years maybe i would do research if i were playing henry viii but otherwise no meryl streep says she doesn't understand the method but instead brings her own process to each role she says always work from the inside you always connect with a piece of material from the inside or you shouldn't do it you always work from the inside out and then you take care of the outside business actually when asked about merrell's own behavior on the set of kramer vs kramer the director robert benton said i never saw one moment of emotion leak out of her except in performance typically you'll find that female actors step out of their roles once the director yells cut bastian speaks a bit to this modern actresses have to contend with sexist casting couch horror stories being paid far less than their male co-stars and a myriad of other issues which gives even the most powerful amongst them a precarious foothold in hollywood with the odds already stacked against her in so many ways an actress can wisely assume that sending her castmates dead animals might be the end of her career this goes double and triple for bipoc actors whose spaces in the industry are so limited already especially in mid-century hollywood strasbourg's method extends to an actor insofar as the specter of total ruin and black sheeping isn't hanging over their heads at every given moment i've never gone full method because to jay ellis's brilliant point you kind of can't right so i'm like wherever tom hardy and leo dicaprio have gone or ryan gosling or chris pine or daniel day-lewis the the god of method i've never really fully gone there because of your great question of like well i don't want to be pulled over for driving while method not fully method i get in trouble for that that's scarier right so if i'm one fourth's method sometimes they're like omari i'm like guys i'm here i still go home to jay and the kids i'm not fully method until you have that leverage to go fully method which perhaps we're all searching for [Music] what was once a cutting-edge practice of acting is now the standard by which we judge major players in the film industry the method or its foundational logic runs so deeply through archaic hollywood institutions that it stretched across gendered and racial lines while the group theater and the actors studio may have started out with pure intentions of innovating the art of acting people like strasbourg allowed their own ambition and pride to distort stanislavski's work for the worst as well as exacerbate the patriarchal undertones baked into it his navel gazing pursuit of celebrity gave birth to generations of male actors whose religious devotion to their art an art form which some of them simultaneously consider lesser than themselves has led to sanctioned abuse within the film industry it's time we find a way forward that doesn't allow the male ego to define prestige rather than the method we can embrace a multiplicity of methods what about anti-realist styles of acting that you can find in the works of auteurs like david mamet spike lee or baslerman great acting doesn't need to be defined by archaic institutions or self-mythologizing what makes a great performance is in the eyes of the audience and the performer themselves we need to trust acting as an art form and find beauty in the many ways it can be mastered as esteemed theater practitioner udahagen once wrote the actor must know that since he himself is the instrument he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his technique should be thought of as less difficult if you're using techniques that are ultimately kind of damaging psychologically your career could really be like cut short because you don't have this like emotional endurance to sustain working as an actor for many many years because it's hard and there's um you know it's hard to enter different psychologies and it's also just a hard industry and so you have to find a way to sustain yourself if you want a long [Music] career i'm happy to say that i'm working with hellofresh again since my province is still in lockdown it's been difficult to keep up some semblance of normalcy recently i found that cooking dinner is one of those rituals that really keeps you grounded but since i'm so busy at the moment it's hard to find time to go to the 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Channel: Broey Deschanel

Views: 284,760

Rating: 4.9386497 out of 5

Keywords: method acting, marilyn monroe, leonardo dicaprio, brad pitt, christian bale, daniel day lewis, suicide squad, margot robbie, scarlett johannson, laura dern, lee strasberg, james dean, marlon brando, a streetcar named desire, rebel without a cause, meryl streep, dustin hoffman, robert de niro, al pacino, the shining, stanley kubrick, shelley duvall

Id: AVWGyuBFgzw

Length: 41min 14sec (2474 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021