Is method acting in Hollywood a man's game?

In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an Olympic snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gunned and go. And in less than a minute, it slipped away. But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world. I'm Michelle Shepard and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, the most wanted Olympian. Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Okay, so Hollywood has had this long love affair with method acting. And the latest actor to really carry the mantle for method acting is Jeremy Strong, who recently appeared in the social reckoning as Mark Zuckerberg. But is method acting only something that men can get away with? I'm Rad Simon Play sitting in Frelamine, I'm Dothma Mood. This is Cabotian, Roe McDermott, and Ian Maxwell are here to get into this with me. Welcome to the show, y'all. Hi, how's it going? It's going great. I've got to say, we've got all the time zones represented in this conversation with Rowan Ireland and Ian in Australia. So thank you for getting up in the wee hours for this. And I go to 4.4 p.m. Okay, so look, I was talking about the long love affair Hollywood has with method actors. I mean, some of the most famous examples is like Robert De Nioh were gaining all this weight in Raging Bull and Daniel De Lewis in Mr. Lincoln. Having everyone call him Mr. Lincoln on the set of Lincoln. And then there's Jeremy Strong, who of course has been known for being a method actor for a very long time in his latest role for the social reckoning. I mean, he would be sending late-night emails to the writer and director Aaron Sorkin in character as Mark Zuckerberg. And I want to start with a clip from an interview that Jeremy Strong did recently with the New Yorker radio hour. He's talking about working on the trial of Chicago 7, his previous movie with writer and director Aaron Sorkin. And at one point on set, Jeremy asked if Aaron Sorkin can pepper spray him so that the tear gas, sorry, hit him with tear gas, spray him with tear gas so that he could experience the real effects for that scene. And here's Jeremy explaining that request. Now what I wanted to do, I want to be very clear, involved no one else and would have involved no one else. It was, you know, for the purpose of a close up and to have the physiological effects of what that would be. Of your eyes burning. So that I, you know, I don't really, you know, the goal in a sense, you know, Brando put himself in a bathtub of ice wants to get a certain effect of numbness. I don't want to act is the point. You don't ever want to act. So Sorkin said no to Jeremy Strong's request to be tear gas. But row, I mean, I'm going to start with you here like, how does someone like Jeremy Strong get to a place where he's like, I need to be tear gas so that I don't, because I don't ever want to act for, can I say, I really like Jeremy Strong like I really, I think he's a fantastic actor. I love his performances. And I kind of love his series that he takes his work like he's incredibly intellectual and he's always referencing poets and playwrights and philosophers and frankly, at a time of increasing anti-intellectualism and culture. I think we need more artists to take those ideas seriously and who use press junk to talk about them. I think that's beautiful. And I do want to distinguish him from some of the actors we're going to discuss later. Because while his approach can make some of his colleagues uncomfortable, I'm not aware of evidence that he's in any way harmful or abuse over trying to put anyone off. That's it. And I'm chasing character all the time. And I can absolutely understand Brian Cox not wanting to spend five years hanging around with Kendall Roy. Like, the characters within succession didn't want to hang out with Kendall Roy. And I understand not wanting to spend your lunch break with Roy Cohen or Mark Zuckerberg. These are not people I would want to spend time with either. But Jeremy Strong, he is of this very particular history and mythology, I would say, of male artistic genius. He grew up idolizing actors like Marlon Brando as he named, checked Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman. He was an assistant for a time for Daniel De Niro, who he says he idolizes. And all of these actors have put in extraordinary performances, but the performances have become inseparable from the stories of base that lens the actors went to achieve them. So we have Robert De Niro gaining 60 pounds for a raging bull. We have Daniel De Niro is learning how to erect like a 17th century house for the Crucible. He lives in character. He immerses himself emotionally and physically in people's worlds, if you think of my left foot, he stays physically within that character. And these stories have become almost as legendary as the performances themselves. And I think I write on these performances, Hollywood has developed this mythology that artistic greatness. I will say we'll get into which male artistic greatness requires suffering and it requires sacrifice and is almost superhuman level of commitment. And this story has become that the more extreme the preparation, the more authentic the performance. And Jeremy Strong has inherited that tradition, and I think genuinely believes in it. But I think we can admire his seriousness, which I do. While also questioning this assumption behind it, that great art necessarily requires extraordinary suffering, or that the more uncomfortable or the more visible or the more extreme the process, the better the results. Because I don't think that's inherently true, and ultimately the performance is what matters, not how much you so far are just getting there, or sometimes major coworkers so far. Ryan's style is really gunned and gold. Ryan James Wedding. I'm Michelle Shepard, and from CBC Podcasts and The Toronto Star, the most wanted Olympian, available now. You know, I want to point out that you did use the word mythology twice in that explanation. And what I, you know, I love that because Ian, I mean, you said that this whole level of immersion, where these actors are pushing their bodies to extremes, and they're staying in character the whole time. Like that isn't actually method acting. Okay. So can you actually, can you explain what is traditional method acting and where it comes from? So traditional method acting emerged in America in the 1920s and 30s, based on the work of Stanislavsky, who was a Russian theater director and actor, who developed what he called a system of acting. And the logic behind the system of acting was that it could produce reliable, coherent performances for stage actors and that in the process, or rather than just pretending an actor would draw upon their own experience and their own memory to put together what he would call a through line of action. And critically for Stanislavsky, the aim was never to become a different person. Famously he wrote something like, you can only act with one soul, which is the soul that you've got. So the role of the actor was to have access to as many of their own memories and experiences as they possibly could have in order to organize and like beads on a string following the script that the writer had given them. So another beautiful thing he wrote was that the human memory is like a huge mansion with many rooms. And the actor's job is to have keys to as many of those rooms as possible. It's a really lovely idea. So the actor is constantly drawing upon analogs in their own experience to experiences that the character is going through. And Stanislavsky argued that if you can access those memories on cue, on call, authentic forms of emotion will spontaneously deliver themselves and will be interpreted by the audience and experienced. Critically, when that work was taken to America in the 1920s, it was taken up in very different ways. So perhaps most famously Strasbourg, the name associated with the American method, associated this idea of memory with trauma. So the key thing for method acting as a developed in America was that what you were going to find when you looked into your memory was almost by different definition going to be something that was traumatic, difficult, dark and risky to play with. So what started being heroicized or valued was the capacity of an actor to draw up deep, dark, hidden things about themselves, things which were also difficult to articulate. So we start getting quite a manned style of acting, pretending to be naturalistic in which characters are almost incoherent, unable to express the intensity of these memories. And we'll manifest nervous ticks and deep, sudden snaps of anger. So we start getting the very, what is now very familiar, modality of acting of the kind of introverted intensity, followed by explosion and a kind of almost quasi neurotic symptomology all the way through it. So that's the shift that happened to Stanislavsky's work, which was not at all concerned with trauma, actually. So that's that's the kind of origins of method acting systematic mining of ones on memory. Yeah, well, you know, I like how you bridge that I could see the trajectory going from mining your own experiences to then getting to the point where you have to create these suffering experiences to tap into. And you know, Roa, I want to bring up one famous example of this famous actor who finally won an Oscar for this so-called kind of method acting. And I'm thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio when he won his Oscar, it had a lot to do with this. Leonardo DiCaprio reveals he slept inside a dead animal. "I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do, whether it's going in and out of frozen rivers or sleeping in animal carcasses or what I ate on set." Leo said he would endure frigid temperatures while filming in the Canadian wilderness and would eat raw bison liver on a regular basis. Okay, so that's a clip from entertainment tonight talking about the making of the revenant. And, and Roa, I mean, look, Leonardo DiCaprio not typically an actor we associate with method acting, but you know, and then, you know, I would argue actually that a lot of his performances where he doesn't go to these extremes are the better performances than the one that he actually won an Oscar for. But that awards season, all I remember hearing is bison liver, bison liver, bison liver, natural life, bison liver, right? And so can you talk about, you know, how how how we got to this point where like method acting is now being used as part of like the press strategy and award season campaigns? I can't wait till Leonardo DiCaprio wins a second Oscar and goes, it was so difficult. I had to date a woman over 40. I think what's fascinating about all of these stories is how the stories of the performances have become an entirely secondary performance running alongside the film itself. Like, we are no longer just watching Leo DiCaprio in the revenant. We're watching the Leonardo DiCaprio suffer in order to make the revenant. We're hearing about the freezing temperatures, the look we're all bison liver that yes, he's repeated endlessly. We're hearing about him sleeping at animal carcasses. We're hearing about the physical ordeal. And all of that becomes part of the film's mythology and the award campaigns. And this is something we've seen repeatedly. Again, Robert Deere of Rating Bull, Christian Bale, New Zealand extraordinary man to wait for the machinist, Daniel Deere is constantly, and these extort, these stories are incredibly marketable because they're tangible, right? We can't necessarily see the hours and actress bands researching a character or developing emotional understanding or studying a script or working on their technique, but we can see a dramatic weight change. We can see someone building a 17th century house. We can hear about this bison liver. And I think there's something really interesting about the way these male actors make the labor of acting so visible and so elaborate and sometimes so deeply inconvenient to other people that it becomes impossible to ignore. Like the work must be witnessed. This suffering must be documented. And then the commitment must be celebrated and awarded, right? And Hollywood does reward it because it loves this story. It gives journalists and awards campaign this fantastic hook. And it turns the actor in some kind of heroic figure who is enjoy this extraordinary ordeal in the pursuit of artistic truth. But I think we do have to question why we associate visible suffering and visible labor with artistic excellence. Because eating raw liver like might be unpleasant, but it's not, again, necessarily evidence you're a better actor. And I think Leo DiCaprio had much better performances when he wasn't attaching all his props and his elaborate ritual to it. And I wonder whether we become more impressed by the story of how a performance was achieved than by the performance itself. Yeah. And so I mean speaking of that, when we get so impressed by the story of bison liver, right? What does that mean when it comes to how we evaluate performances in general? I think it creates this incredibly narrow idea of what extraordinary acting look like. Like we become obsessed with transformation, particularly physical transformation. Like how much weight is someone later lose? How unrecognizable are they? How much discomfort do they enjoy? And all of those things can absolutely be parrot of a great performance, but they're not the same thing as great acting. And some of the most extraordinary performances that I value are social and their characters that are more subtle. And their performances are about restraint and stillness and empathy and humanity and emotional intelligence or communicating something really profound through like a tiny change in expression. And I think of actresses like Amy Adams and Michelle Williams, who have given repeatedly like these astonishingly nuanced performances without necessarily having this dramatic press junkish on this dramatic story of physical suffering attached to them. And neither is one an Oscar, which is crazy, despite these extraordinary bodies work. And I think there's something very interesting about how we interpret all of this extreme, very visible preparation as evidence of genius. When we code, if we wanted to, just as easily interpreted as weakness or insecurity or deficit, I don't, I'm not saying we have to, but I think it's interesting that when it comes to particularly the work of straight white guys, we don't question this framing. Like if an actor needs to stay in character 24 hours a day, perhaps that's an extraordinary level of commitment. But couldn't we also interpret it as an inability to move in and out of a role or an insecurity? Or if you need extraordinary props and physical or deals and elaborate rituals to access a character, is that necessary to have evidence that you're a more talented actor? Or is someone who can simply arrive on set and deliver an equally brilliant performance possibly better? Like is all of that ritual possibly a sign of insecurity or self-indulgent or a deficit in skill or a sign of extraordinary need rather than an extraordinary talent? And I'm not saying that's necessarily case. Like I don't want to diminish the work of all these actors. Like different actors need different processes. But I think it's fascinating that we almost never ask that question when discussing the work of again, mainly white men, because I think if other actresses or people of color career people or new actors did all these, we would be questioning it. But for established white men, we automatically assume that the more elaborate process, the greater the genius. And again, I worry that we end up rewarding the most visible effort rather than the most accomplished result. And we reward suffering. And frankly, if we're going to give Oscars 8 to whoever suffered the most during production, there are quite a few production assistants who are well-overging on the afterwards. Ian, I mean, I'm seeing you nodding along to so much of what Rose saying. I mean, what do you think of all of this? Oh, 100%. You know, certainly the call for perhaps a more nuanced understanding of what acting is is really important. I think we so readily only want to register intensity and shouting and anger as the kind of default settings of what a human being is capable of. I'm really interested in Leonardo DiCaprio, because I think he does something very different most of the time, which is to enjoy a kind of complicity with the audience. So when I was trained as an actor, we had a teacher who used to ask us to break when he clapped his hands in the middle of a scene and wink at the audience and then snap straight back into the work. And I see that kind of life in people like Leonardo DiCaprio, in a way, in which method acting or this idea of immersion doesn't quite capture, because it has this brooding intensity and a profound orientation towards an interiority, which is kind of on fire. And if only you could experience how intense it is to be me, seems to be what we're being asked to look at. Brian Cox referred to this as a particularly American disease with apologies to our American friends. But to me, there's no coincidence that this idea around method acting developed in the context of Freudian thinking, for example, and the idea of a personality in a sense being determined by suppressed childhood trauma. And you know, my feeling is that it's almost a plot of every Hollywood, if I could use that idea as a sort of global idea. Every film is kind of constructed around that narrative. So the number of times in which we, you know, the dramaturgy is of a recalled memory from childhood, which accounts for the behaviour. So there's a sense with this model of acting that we are propelled into our future, almost as if by fate, by this deep internal stuff. And I've always been interested in the fact that for Stanislavski, we are actually oriented to the future that characters have objectives that they are pursuing in the world, rather than being driven blindly, by their, by their experience of trauma. Yeah. I want to add to like, because I mean, one of the things that has been discussed here that Rose bringing up is the gendered aspect of this, right? How this is specifically, I mean, you mentioned it's an American thing. And Rose mentioning that it's, you know, a very white male thing. And you know, that wrote, this is something that's been discussed by other actresses, like the Agnetail or Joy Natalie Portman. They've all talked about method acting as a man's game. And then Kristen Stewart talked about this in this now viral interview with the New York Times last December. And here's some of what she had to say. Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. You know what I mean? Like, there's no bravado in, um, in suggesting that you're a mouthpiece now for someone else's ideas and that to sort of blend yourself, it's just inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method? And I mean, like, really, you know, and I'm not coming for the method. I don't even know enough about the method. - I know you're saying. I mean, the only name that comes to mind is a teacher, you know, Stella Adler, but I can't think of a performer who's associated with it. - So, Ro, I mean, Chris is towards saying that method acting is something that men do to retain their masculinity, and it's also like a way for them to maintain this kind of dominance on set, even when the cameras aren't rolling. So, can you unpack what she's referring to there? - Yeah, I have so much time for Kristen Stewart. I think she's building on something that, yeah, onion, tin or joy, and Natalie Portman and other actresses have come out and gone. This is a method acting is a luxury afforded demand. Like, we have to, first of all, be polite to people on set and we're expected to be professional polite and stomatic character, but we also have to go home and look after people. We don't get the luxury of disappearing into character for months. But, Kristen Stewart is making this even more layered, fascinating observation about masculine and vulnerable. She's saying, acting is inherently vulnerable. You're expressing emotions, you're empathizing with the characters, you're listening to your co-stars, you're opening yourself up, you're submitting yourself to a director's vision, you're following direction, you're allowing other people to shape her performance. And all of these things are things that have been traditionally coded as feminine. And Christian Bale once described acting as, quote, a very sissy job, where people do your hair and make up and look after you, which is very interesting, language-right. But what Stewart is suggesting is that there's very macho-- sorry, my headphones are, I must say, even-- but, Christian Stewart is suggesting that there's very macho spectacular version of method acting. It's very active. American, the immersive version of method acting, is a way of reclaiming masculinity. You're not simply expressing emotions. You are enduring extreme physical conditions. You're mastering your body. You're demonstrating this extraordinary discipline. And you're turning emotional vulnerability into a kind of masculine conquest. But I think there's actually another layer to this, which is about how we value labor generally. So if you think of women and what we've always been expected to do, we have always been expected to be emotionally intelligent, and empathetic, and sensitive, and to understand people's feelings. So when women do this in their acting, there's this tendency to see it as something that comes naturally to them. Whereas men do it, and making our norms performance out of how difficult it is, we then celebrate it as genius. And I think there's a parallel here with gendered labor generally. If we take domestic labor as an example, a woman could cook three meals a day every day, makes an act of her kids, and nobody notices, right? Because this is deemed to be woman's work, and it's deemed to be natural, and something we're good at, and what we want to do. But once a year, and we all know this guy, a man announces that he's firing up the grill, and he's making his steak. And he assembles all his equipment, and he spends three hours preparing one protein for one meal, and we're also being expected to gather around an applaud this extraordinary feat of engineering. And I think there's something of the ceremonial barbecue in this version of method acting. It's about the elaborate preparation, and the specialized equipment, and this extraordinary physical ordeal. It's about this idea of the work has to be visible. Everyone has to witness it. And I think that's what Stuart means. She refers to it when men act, they make it seem like a magic trick. It makes the work seem almost superhuman, as if no one else could possibly achieve it. But again, I'm asking, like, what if we reversed the way we interpret that spectacle? Like, what if it's the women who walk on set and deliver this extraordinary emotional performance that step out of character or professional to the coworker is go home to their families and kids? What if they are actually demonstrating like a greater degree of technical mastery? Why do we assume that the man who needs to remain in character and command the attention of entire room and make everyone accommodate his process? Why do we assume he's the more gifted actor? And maybe he is, but maybe he's simply making more noise about how he gets there. And I think that gendered assumption, is something we really need to interrogate. Like, we've confused the visibility of labor with its value and the performance of artistic difficulty with artistic genius. We've created a culture where invisible work is devalued and this work that is made visible is valued more. And that's, again, that doesn't necessarily mean the performance is better, but I think it maps on to how we think of it to master labor and gender labor in a really interesting way. Well, Ian, I mean, I want to bring you in here from the last 30 seconds that we have left on the show. But yeah, can you just like briefly tell me, because there are women who do method acting, they're just not celebrated for it. So, again, we just have to keep drawing that distinction between method acting as a system for developing consistent performance from this mythologized idea that method acting is somehow full transformation becoming someone else. So famously, Marilyn Monroe trained in the method, Shelley Winters, actors like this, going to Rose Point, a lot of the work of acting is really dull and systematic and controlled, particularly film acting, where the real talent is the talent to be able to stay patient for 45 minutes while lights are set up and then developing a perfectly framed, perfectly nuanced performance with edit points, correct relationship to light, to frame size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. - That's a lot of very dull, straightforward work. - So I do have to cut you off, because we are also out of the show, but thank you both so much for talking to me about this. Ro McDermott is a writer, film critic, and full bright scholar in Ireland. Ian Maxwell is a professor of theater and performance studies he's in Australia. That's it for Kabocha today. I'm Brad Simon-Police sitting at Fairlyn, me, Neb.Mood, see you tomorrow. - For more CBC podcasts, Go to cbc.ca/podcasts.