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It has been quite some time since the public caught a glimpse of the acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Following his announcement in 2017 declaring he would cease to work as an actor, prior to the debut of The Phantom Thread, the actor quietly faded from view. Yet, during his hiatus, his reputation expanded further.

The Legend Surrounding His Method

Primarily, this reputation centers on his preferred approach to roles. As someone known for disappears into the roles he plays – for instance, while filming the Lincoln biopic, reportedly asked the director address him as “Mr President” for the entire production – audiences has become more fascinated with how he works. Is it true he really send messages to co-star Sally Field as Abraham Lincoln? Did he only eat game he hunted for The Last of the Mohicans? And did he demand being spoon-fed for My Left Foot?

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Now, Daniel Day-Lewis has returned in the limelight, somewhat reluctantly, for his new film Anemone. And he is using this to express his anger regarding how method acting is viewed. “I am somewhat annoyed nowadays to hear various individuals gobbling off and using phrases like ‘fully embraced the Method’, which I think is meant to imply that a person’s behaving like a lunatic in a drastic way,” he told a major publication. “People tends to focus on superficial aspects of acting, and those details typically include some sort of self-flagellation or an experience that causes extreme unease or mental instability. But of course, in the career for a performer, it has to principally be about the internal work.”

A World Full of Followers

Frankly, this sounds as if the actor has come out from seclusion only to discover shocked by the acting community that has developed mirroring his methods. When you are widely considered among the best actors in history, and your process includes headbutting a dummy until you break your nose (in Gangs of New York) or spending two days in solitary confinement deprived of sustenance (for In the Name of the Father), then it stands to reason that other actors will want to fill that vacuum by imitating their idol.

Essentially, we now live in a landscape full of half-cocked Day-Lewis impersonators who want nothing more than to demonstrate the sheer amount of effort they put into their roles. On the milder side of this trend we have people like Lady Gaga, who was so desperate to win an Oscar with House of Gucci that she spent the whole campaign attempting to persuade people that she became functionally Italian for a year and a half as preparation.

Then we have Jared Leto, who decided to immerse himself in the character as the Joker (for Suicide Squad) through sending “disturbing” presents to fellow cast members. These, depending on who you ask, included deceased animals to intimate objects and used condoms, though the actor refuted those worst excesses. And then, of course, we have Jim Carrey, who immersed himself so fully as Andy Kaufman during Man on the Moon that filmmakers succeeded to get a full-length documentary from behind-the-scenes footage of him making life to the utmost for everyone around him.

Contemporary Method Practitioners

The foremost Method Guy at the moment seems to be Jeremy Strong (once an assistant to Day-Lewis), whose process while filming Succession was so laboriously intensive that it formed the basis of a derisive New Yorker profile, including statements from people who were worried for his behaviour (“The toll on himself concerns me,” remarked co-star Brian Cox) or annoyed beyond all measure by it (“I remember [him] making everyone else to react with exasperation,” said an unnamed co-star).

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We have numerous additional cases. Andrew Garfield abstained from sex over half a year while preparing for Silence. Leonardo DiCaprio rested inside a dead animal during The Revenant. There’s a fighting chance that actor Austin Butler still speaks like Elvis Presley, three years after that film came out. Each of these instances, to some extent, is meant to invoke the dedication with which Day-Lewis approaches his craft.

A Noble Yet Challenging Battle

Moreover, while his fightback against method detractors might be noble, a brief promotional cycle may prove insufficient to alter perceptions, not to mention their behaviour. Maybe if he wishes to make audiences recall the true essence of the Method, or to demonstrate what it can achieve, then Day-Lewis’s best bet is to simply start making more films. Certainly everyone would support that idea.