Method acting is nothing new – but for every celebrated example there’s a growing number of films that flopped or went overlooked despite the gruelling best efforts of their stars…
There’s always been something undeniably fascinating about the concept of method acting, and the lengths that an actor will go to in order to get into a role. While some may be drawn to the latest blockbuster or comic book adaptation, the knowledge an actor has ‘gone method’ for a particular role can often make the movie an event in itself.
Good method acting offers up a heightened type of performance, one that requires the actor to inhabit every inch of a given character and the audience to believe every second of it.
It also comes with its own folklore of sorts; stories of outlandish and occasionally irritating behind the scenes behaviour from actors pushing themselves to the limit.
The headline acts
Until his retirement, Daniel Day-Lewis was the chief proponent of the modern method movement. Robert De Niro certainly gave the Irish actor a run for his money in his younger years, gaining 60 pounds for Raging Bull and working 12-hours shifts as a cabbie to prepare for Taxi Driver, but Day-Lewis went further, putting himself and others through something approaching hell in the name of art.
For My Left Foot, the biopic of Christy Brown, the Irish painter and writer who lived with cerebral palsy, Day-Lewis learned to write and paint with his toes. He also spent the entire shoot bound to a wheelchair, insisting on being spoon fed and carried everywhere.
“He’d call you by your film name, and you’d call him Christy. It was madness,” co-star Kirsten Sheridan revealed to The Guardian.“You’d be feeding him, wheeling him around. During the entire film, I only saw him walking once.”
To borrow bodybuilder parlance, however, Day-Lewis “endured the pain and enjoyed the gain” in the form of a Best Actor Oscar bagged off the back of his efforts. This approach is not without its pitfalls though and, in truth, should probably have come with a health warning. Because while the Oscar winner may have inspired his peers and future generations of actors to take up the mantle of immersive acting, it hasn’t always gone to plan for those who have followed similar steps.
Bad scripts, dodgy editing, studio interference or a general lack of buzz can often prove the death knell for an actor’s big method moment leaving their resulting performance as something akin to a tree falling in a forest when no one is around to hear it.
Cage
In his younger days, Nicolas Cage experienced this unfortunate phenomenon on more than one occasion. The first came when he had two teeth removed without anesthetic during filming on Alan Parker’s criminally underrated PTSD Vietnam drama Birdy.
“They were baby teeth,” he later told The Telegraph. “So, I took advantage of it and had them out. I thought it would add an interesting dimension to the role.”
Eager to further immerse himself in the role of the badly disfigured and mentally unstable former G.I. Al Columbato, Cage also kept his head completely wrapped in bandages throughout the five-week shoot. It was a decision that drew derision in the streets, with adults guffawing at his ridiculous appearance and children simply staring in disbelief.
It didn’t end well either. “When I took the bandages off, my skin was all infected because of acne and ingrowing hairs,” he later lamented. Matters were made worse when Parker’s much-lauded movie went on to make just $1.4 million off the back of a $12 million budget in 1984.
Still, Cage was back at it again, four years later, with the little seen horror comedy Vampires Kiss, where the script called for his character to eat a live cockroach. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Cage did it. In three takes. Which meant three cockroaches.
Unfortunately, critics and audiences soon had their crucifixes out for Vampire’s Kiss which died a death at the multiplex, burying Cage’s most unsettling onscreen moment – and boy, is there competition there – with it.
Bale
Thankfully that was only a couple of insects. In other instances, actors have taken on extreme and often dangerous diets in the name of method acting.
Christian Bale is arguably the chief proponent of this particular approach. Already a fine actor, Bale has shown himself capable of undergoing extreme and potentially life-threatening physical transformations for his craft. He buffed up for Batman, bloated out to play Dick Cheney in Vice and, most infamously, got alarmingly skinny for The Machinist.
Bale lost an alarming 65 pounds for the role of paranoid insomniac Trevor Reznik, getting by on an exhausting sounding diet of one apple and a single can of tuna a day. He also took up smoking to curb his appetite in what amounts to the world’s worst combination of smells.
That may have all contributed to a hauntingly memorable performance but there were just two problems. Firstly, the film tanked at the box office and secondly, Bale’s extreme weight loss was actually the result of a mistake in the script.
Co-star Michael Ironside revealed to The Daily Mail that screenwriter Scott Mosar initially wrote the film with a much shorter actor in mind. “The writer is only about five-foot-six, and he put his own weights in. And then Chris (who is six foot) did the film and Chris said, ‘No, don’t change the weights. I want to see if I make them.’”
Such an extreme approach may not have paid off financially for the film, but Bale’s terrifyingly gaunt appearance, coupled with the film actually being quite good, has ensured The Machinist retains a cult following to this day.
Kutcher
More importantly, Bale escaped from the experience unscathed which is more than can be said for some of his fellow yo-yo dieting method men.
A case in point being that of Ashton Kutcher. Plenty of eyebrows were raised when the former That 70s Show and Punk’d star was cast as Steve Jobs in the lesser celebrated 2013 biopic Jobs.
Arriving in 2013, two years prior to the star-studded Danny Boyle-directed Aaron Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs, this was a chance for Kutcher to showcase his serious, dramatic side. Not content with studying hundreds of hours of tape of the late Apple founder, Kutcher found decided to go one step further: he ate apples. Lots and lots of apples.
Eager to ape Job’s controversial fruitarian diet regime, Kutcher restricted himself to nothing but fruit, nuts and seeds for one whole month prior to shooting. It was an experience he, thankfully, lived to regret.
“The fruitarian diet can lead to, like, severe issues,” Kutcher eventually told USA Today in the world’s least shocking revelation. “I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie. I was like doubled over in pain. My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying.”
The only thing more terrifying were the reviews for Jobs, which flopped and was almost immediately consigned to the cinematic scrapheap, unable to even find a place in the Blockbuster ex-rental bargain bin it would have surely cohabited had the film arrived in a different era.
Leto
It would have likely been joined there by 2007’s Chapter 27, a distasteful drama depicting the murder of John Lennon which featured an early method turn from Jared Leto as Lennon’s deranged assassin Mark David Chapman.
Leto went all out to gain the necessary 67 pounds to better resemble Chapman, consuming microwaved pints of ice cream alongside olive oil and soy sauce. Unfortunately, this unusual diet resulted in a nasty and rather old-fashioned bout of gout for rising star.
More unfortunate still, the film itself failed to offer much insight in Chapman or the motivations behind his crime, and drew enough criticism and controversy to see it ushered into obscurity with little protest.
Campbell-Hughes
A similar fate awaited the German drama 3096 Days. Released in 2013, the film chronicled the real-life kidnapping and hostage of 10-year-old girl Natascha Kampusch by Wolfgang Priklopil in Vienna back in the late 1990s.
Kampusch spent eight years in captivity before escaping and going on to write the best-selling book the film was adapted from. Cast in the role of Kampusch, Northern Irish actor Antonia Campbell-Hughes took method acting to a dangerous new extreme, starving herself and spending time in a five-by-five square meter dungeon created to replicate the one designed by Priklopil.
For Campbell-Hughes, the aim was simple, with the actress telling The Evening Standard she wanted to “suffer as much as she did.” Whether that could ever be true is doubtful but suffer she undoubtedly did. Unable to stand and often naked with her head shaved in parts, Campbell-Hughes suffered cuts, bruises, a torn Achilles tendon and both a broken nose and fractured rib.
With details of these experiences dominating much of the discussion even before the film was released, it wasn’t a huge surprise to see 3096 Days receive no theatrical release in most countries.
Shia
Extreme experimentation is nothing new in the world of cinema but there is usually someone who takes it too far, like Shia Lebeouf. The once fresh-faced star of the Transformers franchise has undergone a very different kind of transformation of late. While his substance abuse issues are well-documented, on several occasions they have ended up spilling over into his work, or rather his preparations for a variety of roles.
Keen to get into the mindset of the mindset of an illegal bootlegger for John Hillcoat’s Lawless in 2012, LeBeouf consumed copious amounts of moonshine both before and during filming to the point where he allegedly fought with co-star Tom Hardy and left co-star Mia Wasikowska feeling uncomfortable.
“She was calling her attorney, like, ‘Get me the f*** out of here,’” LaBeouf told NY Daily News, defending his on-set moonshine habit as necessary in order to get “that drunk bloat” his character needed.
There were no such excuses for his antics while making the disorientating romantic drama The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman a year later, with LeBeouf embarking on an acid trip to prepare for the role. Both films ultimately went under the radar, with their star’s destructive antics ultimately backfiring to create more negative headlines than positive ones.
Fox
Method acting missteps are not the preserve of independent cinema though. For 2012’s big budget reboot of the Alex Cross franchise which saw Tyler Perry replace Morgan Freeman as the titular detective, director Rob Cohen enlisted Matthew Fox to play the film’s big bad hitman, Picasso.
A vicious killer who moonlights as a cage fighter in the film, the role represented a major departure for Fox, who had previously carved out a niche as a likeable leading man in shows like Lost and Party Of Five. Eager to prove himself, Fox threw himself into an intensive diet and exercise regime that saw him shed 40 pounds through a combination of mixed martial arts training and what he later described as a “very leafy” diet.
The resulting performance was suitably terrifying, with Fox a musclebound shell of his once affable self.
Unfortunately, the movie was also terrifying but more in a ‘oh my God what have they done’ kind of way. It was so badly received it effectively killed off the once bankable Alex Cross franchise – plans for a sequel starring Perry had been announced before the movie was even released but were quickly shelved once the reviews and box office takings began coming in.
Jared
The final word on the subject of misguided method acting undoubtedly goes to the Joker in the pack, Jared Leto. While his frozen dairy-based attempts at channeling Mark Chapman failed to generate little other than some nasty joint inflammation, Leto was eventually rewarded for his efforts with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar earned off the back of his brilliant turn in Dallas Buyer’s Club.
Leto put himself through the wringer once again, losing 30 pounds and, in an excruciating and entirely unnecessary extra touch, waxing himself from head to toe. It was a win that made him hot property in Hollywood and the ideal choice among Warner Bros executives to play the Joker in the long-gestating adaptation of the DC Comics favourite Suicide Squad.
In fairness, he went into the project with mighty big method acting shoes to fill. After being cast in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger locked himself in a London hotel room for an entire month, scrawling a daily diary in character as the Clown Prince of Gotham, before going on to deliver the definitive incarnation of the character. One that landed him a posthumous Oscar, which was something of a rarity for a comic book adaptation.
Even so, it’s fair to say Leto went overboard in search of his inner crazy, spending time in an asylum, meeting disturbed inmates and spending a night locked in a prison cell.
Then there were the gifts.
Will Smith received a bullet in the post while a hired ‘henchman’ delivered a dead pig to the set. That was the acceptable stuff. Margot Robbie claimed Leto sent her a live rat (he has since denied it) while the most unsettling claim concerned reports someone was sent a used condom (he’s stayed pretty quiet on this).
It might, just might, have all been worth it, but fans will never know.
Despite being billed as one of the stars of Suicide Squad, much of Leto’s work ended up left on the cutting room floor amid rumours David Ayer’s film was drastically recut in post-production and without the director’s input.
To endure all of that only to suffer such disappointment must have been an experience not that dissimilar to the one felt by anyone who saw Suicide Squad with Leto still doing enough with his limited screen time to earn a reputation as the antithesis of everything that made Ledger’s Joker great: showy, one dimensional and anything but terrifying.
The original cut of the film could well have rescued Leto’s efforts but there is little clamour for Warner Bros to #ReleaseTheAyerCut, especially after Joaquin Phoenix’s triumphant – and also Oscar-winning – take on the role in 2019’s Joker dispelled the notion that Ledger’s clown shoes were impossible to fill.
Whether Leto’s experience serves as a lesson to anyone else considering going method remains to be seen – including Leto himself. The artist formerly known as Joker has jumped straight back into graphic novel territory with the upcoming Marvel movie Morbius: The Living Vampire.
Keep an eye out for reports of Leto sleeping in a coffin, eating only raw meat and avoiding garlic like the plague. And have some Holy Water at the ready, just in case….
