The Madness Behind ‘The Method’

The movie House of Gucci, which came out in 2021, tells a story of the real-life family behind the famous fashion label.

It's a wild, scandalous tale, but the most breathless, gossipy headlines about the film didn't have to do with its plot.

They had to do with its actors, two of whom had gone method for their performances.

What I cannot wrap my head around is people who still just for ego or the pleasure of it.

Lady Gaga, the film star, spoke in the Italian accent you just heard for nine months.

I think that there's a sort of idea around method acting that it's crazy and that we're crazy.

But I think that for those of us that commit ourselves to method acting, there's something about us that's just fully committing ourselves to the art on a cellular level.

Gaga's co-star, Jared Letow, used prosthetics prosthetics and a hairpiece to render himself totally unrecognizable.

It's really just a way to stay incredibly focused and committed and concentrated.

That's really another way to describe going method.

Leto has also become infamous in recent years for staying in character, particularly on the sets of superhero movies.

When he was playing The Joker, he allegedly sent his colleagues used condoms and a dead rat.

When people talk about the method, that is usually what they think.

Isaac Butler is the author of The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act.

They think Leonardo DiCaprio preparing to do the revenant, right?

I don't know if you remember when he was doing his Oscar campaign for The Revenant.

He starts talking about the dozens of different things he did for that role, which included eating raw organ meat.

Bison, maybe?

Yeah, which is especially wild since he's like vegan.

I wanted to get the real thing, and it was this giant liver that was incredibly disgusting.

My reaction is very much up on screen, which is a nauseating one.

They think that or, you know, Daniel Day-Lewis making a bark canoe before doing Last of the Mohicans.

So it's a process where you do an incredibly in-depth and extensive, intense

kind of research that usually involves kind of living as the character lives.

But if that's what we now think of the method, it wasn't always.

The truth of the matter is that, you know, for most of the method's history, the method is not building bark canoes.

The method is not eating bison organs raw when you're a vegan.

The lay understanding of the method and what the method is to people who teach it are extraordinarily different things.

I mean, they almost couldn't be further apart.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

We talk about method acting all the time, but do we really know what it is?

In this episode, Isaac Butler, who wrote a whole book about the method, is going to be our guide, showing us how this approach came to be so well known and yet so widely misunderstood.

It's a saga that spans three centuries, involves scores of famous actors, directors, and teachers, and that altered how we think about realism, authenticity, and a good performance.

So, today, on Decodering, what is the method?

And how did it come to mean going over the top?

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The story of the method begins in late 19th century Russia, a time when good acting looked a lot different than it does now.

There's a few analogs to what acting was like that you could go out and kind of watch right now if you wanted to.

Opera gets us pretty close.

Silent film acting probably gets us pretty close.

Think of Charlie Chaplin.

We can't hear him, but we still need to understand him.

And so he makes sure we can.

His emotions play across his face with so much clarity they could be typed there.

His performances are just right for a silent movie, but they're bigger, more telegraphed, more heightened, less realistic than contemporary film acting.

And though theater actors in the late 19th century could be heard by their audiences, they had other constraints to overcome.

For most of the 19th century, theaters are not particularly brightly lit.

You know, if you wanted to project to the audience that your character is feeling a certain emotion, you would actually strike a particular pose.

Particularly in Russia, you were looking at really big performances happening in front of stock sets, and plays only had like nine rehearsals.

And so the shows didn't really have coherent interpretations.

And then along comes a man named Konstantin Stanislavski.

Konstantin Stanislavski, who is many things.

He's an actor, he's a director, he's a teacher.

He also is a wealthy merchant industrialist who oversees a textile empire.

He and this playwright and critic, Vladimir Nemirovich Danschenko, co-found a theater called the Moscow Art Theater, and they want to completely revolutionize Russian theater practice.

They want to embrace a more realistic performance style.

The Moscow Art Theater succeeds, and a few years into its existence, while the company is on a wildly popular tour of Europe, something simultaneously pedestrian and monumental happens.

Stanislavski has a bad day as an actor.

All actors have this happen.

He goes through the mechanical motions of the character, but he's not really feeling anything.

He's not really inspired.

And for Stanislavski, this was a huge crisis.

And so he embarks on developing something called the system

that will be a way for actors to have inspiration and really feel the vibrant life of their characters on demand.

So some of the details of the system shift a lot, but there are certain things that are pretty much always there.

He was deeply invested in physical relaxation, concentration, and attention.

Sort of what we would think of as mindfulness exercises, actually.

He was really influenced by yoga, but he also wanted to train the actors' attention so that they could ignore the audience and really be present in the moment.

He developed a whole system of analyzing a script.

If you've ever heard the term story beat or acting beat, he's the one who came up with that.

He started to create this whole series of ideas around, you know, characters have a motivation.

There's a thing they are trying to do.

They have a problem and that problem motivates action.

And then most famously, he came up with this idea of affective memory, which is the idea that the mind remembers emotions.

It remembers the emotions associated with events in your life.

And by digging back into those events in your life,

you can actually dig up those emotions and use them as material to realize a character.

All of this is in pursuit of something new.

Stanislavski no longer wants actors to deftly pretend, to use comprehensible but conventional gestures, to do the part how it had always been done.

He wants them to experience the role, to experience the emotions of their character, night after night.

He spends decades expanding, refining, changing, and writing about techniques and theories to achieve this kind of experiencing.

But he's not precious about it.

Stanislavski is very resistant to the idea that the system would be codified.

And so he actually always wrote it in quotation marks and all-in-lowercase letters because he wanted it to be able to grow and change.

You know, it's not really a system,

it's a bunch of different ideas and techniques for realizing and for developing experiencing.

And the system does grow and change as it leaves Russia and heads abroad.

How does the system make its way to America?

The short answer is the Russian Revolution happens.

The Russian Civil War is going on.

The Moscow Art Theater is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

The future is really unclear.

And so they decide to go on tour.

And they

hit America like a lightning bolt.

I mean, it is wild the reception they get.

The first performance they do in New York City gets a 30-minute standing ovation at the end of it.

Everyone is saying this is the greatest acting ensemble I've ever seen.

One of Stanislavski's key ideas was that everyone in a production has to dedicate themselves equally to the craft of realizing their character.

He is actually the guy who wrote the phrase, there are no small parts, only small actors.

So part of what people are impressed by is like, even the spear carrier, even that guy is giving a performance that seems like better than most acting you've ever seen.

And so people have just really never experienced anything like that.

And they're really hungry to learn how did they do it?

How did they pull this off?

Two members of the Moscow Art Theater who can't go back to Russia for political reasons stay in New York and start a school called the American Laboratory Theater.

It teaches the system to a whole generation of future actors, writers, directors, and teachers, including a young man named Lee Strasberg.

What I feel about the theater is very simply:

it is the art that is closest to reality.

Lee Strasberg is born in the shtetl.

His family immigrates to the United States.

They live on the Lower East Side.

He is a

genius and an autodidact

and a kind of withdrawn shy kid.

And he starts working in the Yiddish theater and then he goes and he sees the Moscow Art Theater and he's just like, holy crap, what is this?

This is, what have I been doing?

Strasberg starts taking classes at the American Laboratory Theater, eventually enrolling in the directing class with his friend, the critic and director Harold Klurman.

I met Strassberg and he was interested in certain techniques of acting.

I wasn't interested in techniques of acting.

I knew it could acting.

I was interested, what is the theater going to say?

And I said, the theater must say something.

It must relate to society.

It must relate to the world below.

It must relate to us.

Klerman, Strasberg, and their friend and future producer Cheryl Crawford decide to start a theater company in this spirit.

It's 1931, the early days of the Great Depression, but they assemble a group of impassioned theater people, mostly Jewish and immigrants or the children of immigrants, to make a theater that can speak to this American moment.

They call it the group theater.

It's very inspired by the Moscow Art Theater.

So So they are also going to have a fixed ensemble.

They are also going to pick, you know, the best place.

They're only going to do the ones they really believe in.

And they're going to have a shared theory of acting, which is based on Stanislavski's system.

And to get started, they head out of town.

They go to summer camp.

This is something Stanislavski had also done.

Try to bond an ensemble by getting out of the city.

So they actually keep a diary of that first summer.

I've read it.

And so you can see they're just sort of like fired up with this purpose.

And they start taking these acting classes with Strasbourg.

And they're like, I've only been here three days and I feel like I have been born anew.

I'm emerging from the chrysalis.

They're working hard rehearsing a play and adopting and adapting Stanislavski's system into their own method.

But they're also playing hard too.

So they're not a group with a lot of boundaries, you know?

They're drinking all the time and they're hooking up with each other.

One time they have too much to drink during lunch, and then they're not able to really go through the motions in rehearsal.

And Lee, who is very quick to anger, gets furious with them.

And so, in response to that, they just start destroying everything.

They're like ripping open the pillows and throwing the feathers everywhere.

They're taking off their clothes and going skinny dipping.

And then Harold Klareman has to like broker a peace agreement between them and Lee Strasberg so they can keep working.

So, what is the deal with Lee?

Even people who were devoted to Lee Strasberg, who loved him and, you know, thought he was a genius, would also say, like, he's incredibly unpleasant.

And it was really his way or the highway.

And if you weren't doing things up to his standards, he would very quickly start screaming at you.

Because you've got to become aware of when you're doing what time.

And there's no point putting on this big act, which is of no value.

You are slothful.

You are lazy.

When you came here, you didn't move at all.

Strasberg emphasizes one part of the system in particular, particular: effective memory, the aforementioned technique where actors dig into their own psychology and experiences to access emotions they'll use in their work.

Strasberg takes it further than anyone had in the past.

His whole thing is that, like, no, no, no, go in pursuit of these memories.

Don't wait for them to spontaneously come about.

Let's go chase it down and create the trigger so that you can use it.

And the end result of that is what the group calls taking an exercise.

How would would that work in a class?

If we were in class, what I would have you do is I'd be like, well, Willa, you want to, let's let, you know, you were working on grief or whatever.

I would have you sit down and relax and close your eyes and be totally, totally relaxed.

And then I would ask you to think of a memory in which you would experience this emotion.

And then you're not going to tell me the story of the memory and you're not going to describe the memory.

All you're going to do is narrate to me the sensory details of the memory.

And so, you know, let's say it's the death of a loved one.

You talk about, oh, the feel, the rough feeling of their hands, the beeping of the heart monitor, and the antiseptic smell.

And then all of a sudden,

you would feel it.

You would start really feeling it.

And then we would slowly work to figure out, okay, so what becomes the shorthand that triggers this?

And maybe it's heartbeat monitor.

And you hear that sound and then you really vividly feel that grief.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense based on what we know about trauma and triggering today.

From the start, the results of this new approach to effective memory are very good, but they're also fraught.

Among other things, it's painful to reimagine a traumatic experience over and over again.

People are starting to already see,

this might not work.

Like, what if you do the same memory over and over again and it gets stale?

Or like, what if you get so into

feeling these really big emotions?

Because when you're a young actor, and I say this to somebody who was a young actor, like, it really feels great to be like, I can cry and feel so deeply.

I'm still alive, you know?

And so, the tendency to indulgence is difficult to resist.

And some members of the group just hated doing it.

I didn't want to think of when I was

moved by

my sister when she vomited.

I didn't like that whole thing.

That is is Stella Adler.

Stella Adler is the daughter of Jacob Adler, one of the greatest actors and impresarios of the Yiddish theater stage.

She's kind of a Jewish aristocrat as a result of being Jacob Adler's daughter.

She had been a professional actor since the age of five.

I simply was brought up to be what I am.

And I suppose it's coming over as being very theatrical.

And she particularly thought that effective memory was sick is the word she would use throughout her life, that it was sick.

It was a sick thing to do.

I mean, she clearly tried it, but she really, really disliked it.

And she and Strasberg personally disliked each other almost from the jump.

She was probably the best actor they had, and she was often the female lead in their production.

So Lee couldn't escape her.

And so they fought constantly.

In 1934, Strasberg and Adler's disagreement about effective memory ratchets up when Stella goes to Paris.

It turns out Stanislavski is there, and she meets up with Stanislavski and she tells Stanislavski that she hates his system, that he's ruined acting.

And he says, Well, maybe you don't understand it, or maybe it's not working, but why don't you come to my apartment tomorrow and we'll work together and we'll see what we can figure out.

And she studies with him for four or five weeks, and she comes back to the United States and she walks into a meeting and she says, Lee Strasberg has gotten this all wrong.

And I know because I asked Stanislavski, Slofsky, she tells them the system is about imagination, it's about textual analysis, it's the beat, it's the problem, it's the action, it's all those other things, and it's not this emotional memory thing that is not the core of the system.

The group is so relieved to learn that they don't, maybe don't have to do effective memory anymore, that when she's done with her presentation, they stand up and sing the internationala.

So she's like, and that's why effective memory isn't important.

And they stand up and they're like, rise, you children of starvation, you know, whatever it is.

In the months that follow, Adler starts teaching the group members herself.

Strasberg leaves the theater and the group's ethos and approach, its method, heads to Hollywood.

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Rules and restrictions apply.

So, in the 1930s, as a result of the talkies, you know, now that actors need scripts, and because the movie studios suddenly become much richer and much more powerful, because talking cinema makes movies more popular, they go on this hiring spree.

And so, when people get mad at the group and they quit the group, that's where they go.

And then, the first real method movie star, who's a guy named John Garfield, goes out to Hollywood.

All my life, I

His original name is Julius Garfinkel.

He is a tough Jewish kid from the wrong side of the tracks.

He had actually ridden boxcars across America and back, and he is a breakout young star of the group.

But he eventually doesn't get a role that he wants in the company.

And so he leaves the group and goes out to LA.

And he makes makes this movie called Four Daughters.

Four Daughters is a trifle.

It's not a great movie.

I mean, it's actually very, it's cute.

It's worth seeing, but it's, it's a trifle.

But

what you can really see in it is as soon as his character shows up,

you're just like, what the hell is that?

According to Felix, I'm supposed to introduce myself.

Mickey Boughton.

He just seems more alive than everyone else around him.

It's listed like this bold, new acting technique.

You can just tell something new is happening.

In this scene, Garfield has a loosened tie and a faint trace of stubble.

He's got a casual physicality and he sounds like a regular person.

What type of ad are you?

The gruff voice hiding the soft heart?

Or are you the sweet, simple landscapes alive?

I smell something burning at.

And this is in 1938, when movie stars tended to sound like this.

Now, please listen to me.

You certainly can't think that I did that intentionally.

Well, if I could think, I'd have run when I saw you.

That's Catherine Hepburn and Carrie Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

And I say this with a lot of love because their other movie, The Philadelphia Story, is my very favorite.

But they were a little affected.

And that's because they were a product of the studio system.

The studio would work with you to create this kind of persona.

a type.

It's called a type.

This is where typecasting comes from, right?

And then for the rest of your career, really, you would play roles that exist in in some kind of relationship to that type.

That's what Carrie Grant is doing in Bringing Up Baby, in which he plays a geeky paleontologist.

You're not thinking, oh, wow, that guy's really a nerd.

You're thinking, isn't it fun to watch Carrie Grant play this uptight, easily flustered nerd, you know?

And there's great acting during that time.

I am not putting that down.

It is all about, though, its core

engine is the type and the relationship of the actor to the type.

The type is not the core engine of what John Garfield or any other group-trained actor is doing, though.

And by the early 1940s, after the group theater goes bust, there are a lot more of them in Hollywood.

And they're just doing things differently.

You know, instead of being like, oh, hello, would you like a bottle of beer?

They're like, oh, would you like a bottle of beer?

You know, they're dressing like slobs, they're slouching, they're trying to be like real people instead of an idealized idea of how people should behave.

As we head into the 1950s, this approach is going to stop being strange and start being what we expect of acting.

The actor most responsible for popularizing this kind of realistic performance style is Marlon Brando.

You don't understand.

I could have had class.

I could have been a contender.

I could have been somebody

instead of a bump.

Which is what I am.

Let's face it.

But before Brando was that Brando, he was a young man taking acting classes at the New School with the former group theater member Stella Adler.

Adler had gone out to Hollywood in the 1930s too.

By the 40s, she was back in New York and working as an acting teacher.

You must contribute to the words.

The words are not your privilege.

The words are somebody else's.

You must do something with them.

Marlon Brando learned her version of the system.

He learned that the actor has to earn the right to play the role.

They have to enlarge their soul to a point where it is capacious enough to

play the character.

And you do that through very rigorous research.

And research means reading books about the part, but it also might mean, you know, if you're playing an 18th century Viscount in a play or whatever, you're going to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and you're going to look at paintings of Europeans from the 18th century so you can see how they held their body.

You know, you're going to try to practice the behaviors of the character.

You got to iron a shirt.

Well, you're going to spend all night ironing shirts until you can do it automatically.

Grando's work with Stella eventually brought him to the attention of director-producer Ilya Kazan, probably the most successful group theater alum of all.

Kazan had started at the group as an intern, basically, but he was so useful, he swiftly accrued responsibilities, first as an actor and then as a director.

When the group breaks up, his star continues to ascend.

By the mid-1940s, he's directing directing Hollywood movies and big Broadway plays alike, plays like Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, which is the show he wants and gets Brando for.

Brando debuts as streetcar's Stanley Kowalski on Broadway in 1947, and the movie version comes out in 1951.

Now, we got here in the state of Louisiana what's known as Napoleonic Code.

You see, now, according to what that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband also, and vice versa.

Will you listen?

As an actor, he's just doing things that you feel like you've never seen before, even though now you've seen them hundreds of times.

He just seems really alive.

He is doing some specific technical things.

His approach to text is to make it feel like spoken text, even if that means throwing an important line away, or even if that means mumbling.

What do you think you are?

Fair queens?

I just remember what Huey Long said: that every man's a king, and I'm the king around here.

And don't you forget it.

His way with emotion, his emotions are so vivid, and he's able to seemingly call call them up and turn them on and off at will.

It started having a huge, huge, huge influence on acting, particularly after he did On the Waterfront a couple years later.

And, you know, interview after interview with actors of the period, it's like everyone came to New York and they started doing a Brando impression.

Everyone just wanted to be Marlon Brando, or they wanted to sleep with Marlon Brando, or both.

And anyone who wanted to be like Brando started flocking to yet another arts organization, the Actors Studio, the place where the method finally becomes famous.

The Actor Studio was founded in 1947 by Ilya Kazan and two other former group theater members.

It wasn't a school or a theater, but a space for already working actors to hone and sharpen their skills.

In its early years, it hopped from building to building around Midtown before settling on West 44th Street.

But from the start, it was a starry affair.

Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Montgomery Clift, and Jerome Robbins were in its inaugural class.

In 1951, the year the movie version of Streetcar Named Desire comes out, the actor studio hires a new director.

Someone you know from earlier in this story.

Lee Strasberg, the hisway or the highway co-founder of the group theater, particularly devoted to effective memory.

No matter how good a performance may be,

it leaves me unsatisfied because there's always more.

For me, whatever step anybody has achieved is always only the prelude to something more.

Strasberg hadn't had much success since leaving the group theater in the mid-1930s, but he's tapped to leave the actor's studio just as it's exploding, thanks to its affiliation with Brando and Kazan.

It takes off like a rocket in the 50s.

Aaliyah Kazan's at the studio and he's casting out of the studio.

And so everyone wants to be in the studio because the hottest director in town is casting out the studio.

And then soon he's not the only one.

There's playwrights all over the studio.

There's directors all over the studio.

Anyone who wants to be a serious theater artist or film artist is working at the studio if they can.

And then the other thing is James Dean.

joins the studio and he's at the studio during the you know the those last couple years of his his life as he's becoming super famous.

And then Marilyn Monroe never officially joins the studio, but she gets taken under the wing of the Strasbourgs.

When I started to work with him, I would sort of assume something.

And he says, what are you doing?

I said, well, I have to get into the part.

He says, no, but you're a human being, so you start with yourself.

And so everyone wants to know, why is the most famous and beautiful woman on earth coming to the actor studio?

What is this mysterious organization?

What's it all about?

And increasingly, what it's about is Lee Strasberg's method of teaching acting.

Up to this point, the method with a lowercase M had sometimes been used by former members of the group theater to refer to that theater's approach and the descendants of that approach.

It was basically an insider catch-all term to describe anyone teaching acting with an eye towards experiencing.

But as the actor studio becomes this hotbed of creativity and casting, a who's who of Hollywood, Strasburg's approach with its emphasis on effective memory, interiority, and psychology is elevated and capitalized.

Once we reach the 1950s, the method gets a capital M, and it means the teachings and techniques of Lee Strasberg.

Does this happen because Lee is like, I am teaching the method?

It kind of happens organically, to be completely honest.

It happens because the public starts doing it that way.

He starts calling it that.

People at the actor's studio start calling it that.

But it's a gradual thing that evolved.

There's no point where there's a New York Times article where they're like, we now call it the method.

It just kind of happens.

By 1957, though, the New York Times is running an essay that assumes readers know what the method is.

The most talked about approach to acting in the American theater.

It's Temple, the Actor Studio.

It's high priest Lee Strasberg.

Strasberg's interpretation of Stanislavski has become the famous one, even though, as you know, he's not the only interpreter in town.

One of the weird ironies is that Marlon Brando, the man who became the most associated with the Method for most of the 20th century, did not like Lee Strasberg and did not train with him and drifted away from the actor's studio after Lee Strasberg took it over in the early 1950s.

And because the Strasbourgs were happy to take credit for him, he became kind of sucked up in the method publicity machine as this is the great method actor.

And he resented Lee Strasberg for the rest of his life about that.

He would say stuff in interviews like Lee Strasberg didn't teach me anything.

It was all Kazan and Stella.

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Beginning in the late 1960s, movies enter a mind-bogglingly creative period known as the New Hollywood era.

And the students of Strasbourg Adler and another group theater alum, the teacher Sanford Meisner, are all over it.

The two movies that really kick that off are Bonnie and Clyde and the Graduate, right?

Bonnie and Clyde is directed by actor studio mainstay Arthur Arthur Penn.

It stars and is produced by Warren Beatty, who studied with Stella Adler.

Faye Dunaway, the co-star is a method actor.

Gene Hackman's a method actor.

Stell Parsons, longtime member of the actor studio.

Gene Wilder, longtime member of the actor studio.

Then you go to the graduate, Mike Nichols, former directing student of Lee Strasberg's, Dustin Hoffman, method actor, and Bancroft, long-standing member of the actor studio.

And so from then on, it's just everyone.

I mean, it's really, it's shockingly everyone.

By 1979, nine of the 10 acting nominees of the Oscars are actor studio members.

As the charismatic guru heading up the actors studio, Lee Strasberg has become really famous himself.

He even gets an Oscar nomination for playing Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II, across from his student, Al Pacino.

When a man comes to this point in his life,

He wants to turn over the things he's been blessed with, turn them over to friends.

Strasberg's teachings are not uncontroversial.

Critiques about effective memory being unpleasant, indulgent, unimaginative, and dangerous lurk around, as does the idea that the method is too inward-focused, too close to psychoanalysis, too caught up in an actor's neuroses.

But when Strasberg dies in 1982, he's known as the most important and influential acting teacher of the 20th century.

What Lee's training was was to learn how not to lie, to really tell the truth, how not to act.

That's what he taught.

How not to pretend, to not act as though I feel bad, but to feel bad.

That's the actress Ellen Burstyn.

If time had stopped at Strasberg's death, the public's understanding of the method would have been as his.

But time never stops.

And so the meaning of the method starts to change, thanks to one actor in particular.

You talking to me?

You talking to me?

Right when Strasberg died, his idea of the method is overtaken by De Niro's.

But who the hell else are you talking?

Talking to me?

So in the 70s, De Niro starts developing this process that involves really extensive research, months of research of all kinds, and then often not breaking character once he's on set.

Robert De Niro was affiliated with the actor studio and Lee Strasberg, but the seeds of this process don't come from them.

They come from Stella Adler, with whom De Niro studied as a very young man.

I always give her credit for having a big influence on me.

It's not about neuroses, it's about the character and about

being faithful to the text, the script.

And he takes her ideas and pushes them much further than anyone else, probably further than she would have approved of, I would guess, but I don't know.

And so he does this movie called Bang the Drum Slowly, in which he plays a terminally ill and not particularly bright baseball catcher from Georgia.

I always been pretty much of a nobody, though, so I guess what I got to do is I got to develop brains.

Robert De Niro did not know anything about baseball, so instead, he interviewed a bunch of baseball players.

He taught himself how to chew tobacco.

He changed his walk.

He changed his training regimen so that he would work out like a baseball player.

He learned how to practically play baseball.

He went to Georgia with a tape recorder and had people say his lines into the tape recorder so he could master the dialect on and on and on and on.

And he pushes that further and further and further in film after film until we get to Raging Bull.

And this is really the fulcrum point.

I'm going to smack you again.

Draw it again.

Raging Bull is about a real life person, Jake LaMada, and it's based on his memoir.

And

for that movie, he

all but lived with LaMada.

He learned how to be a boxer.

LaMada actually trained him in boxing, and he knocked out LaMada's teeth.

He wore these prosthetics to kind of transform how he looked.

And, you know, he also refused to break character on set.

And you'll read interviews with people who worked on that film that were like, he was scary, man.

And you called him champ.

Famously, that movie is bookended by sequences where you see the retired LaMada who's kind of gone to seed.

You don't understand.

I could have had class.

I could have been a contender.

I could have been somebody.

And De Niro did what I think many of us would love to do for a job, which is that he stopped working out and he ate his way through France and Italy for two months to gain 60 pounds for the role.

And it gave him rashes on the inside of his thighs.

He developed a snore.

He had trouble breathing.

He had trouble tying his shoes.

It's controversial in the time.

Champions of De Niro's, like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kahl, are like, what is this?

This is terrible.

This is frightening.

This is not acting.

This is not real.

Like, you shouldn't do this.

It's bad, you know?

And the film is actually initially a flop, but it wins him best actor.

And it really catapults him to being thought of as the best living actor.

And as a result, it just becomes a hugely influential technique.

Meryl Streep, who's definitely not a method actor, does a similar style of transformation for Sophie's choice, where she learns to speak Polish and German, she loses a bunch of weight, then she gains it back, she wears false teeth, you know, etc., etc., and so forth.

And then, you know, Al Pacino really admires what she does and that he wants to do that for Scarface and on and on and on and on and on until the point where we get to Daniel Day Lewis, who's living in a wheelchair for a year or whatever.

This was for his Oscar-winning performance in 1989's My Left Foot.

And a reporter's like, so is this the method?

And Daniel Day-Lewis actually says in that interview, I am not a method actor.

I do not ascribe to any particular method.

I have a practical problem of trying to realize.

And yet the public is so convinced that that's the method that it doesn't matter.

That is now a method actor.

It's not just the public, though.

Here's Zoe Kravitz joking around with Jimmy Fallon about playing Catwoman.

I would study cats.

I did that.

I would drink milk out of a bowl.

I did that.

You did not.

I did.

You drank milk out of a bowl?

Maybe.

I'm method, dude.

Me too.

It's been 40 years since Raging Bull came out, and whole generations have grown up thinking of the method as this particular kind of showy, externalized approach.

Even if Daniel Day-Lewis and an actor like Succession's Jeremy Strong, who recently denied being method, know they aren't method in the classic sense, in the effective memory sense.

That's become pretty specialized knowledge.

And the actor Jig Gyllenhall touched on part of the reason why in his recent Saturday Night Live monologue.

I remember for this movie Nightcrawler, I went to the director and I was like, get ready for me to lose 48 pounds and win the Oscar.

For decades, physically transforming oneself for a role has been rewarded with awards and nominations, but also with attention.

Extreme preparation dramatically illustrates an actor's commitment while lending itself to late-night banter and news items and gossip.

One of the reasons why we hear all of these stories about physical transformation and living as the character and wanting to be called Brad all the time, I think it's an easy way of explaining to the public everything that you're doing to prepare for a role.

Like, look at how hard I worked.

But there are virtues in a less showy kind of preparation, and it's that it's less showy.

There's a fine line between serious and self-serious, between committed and over-committed, between fascinating and ridiculous, between hardworking and press-seeking.

As the most headline-garnering method actor around has become Jared Leto, behaving badly for bad movies, there's been a lot more carping about the method, a lot more skepticism about it.

Whereas the actor, Robert Pattinson, put it a few years ago.

You only ever see people doing the method when they're playing an asshole.

The irony here is that even as the common understanding of the method has gotten so mangled, even as it's transformed from an internal psychological technique to an external research-intensive technique, to a seemingly attention-garnering technique even some actors want to disavow.

The original method and the system from which it sprang are still all around us.

Think of the method like a glacier, a giant force that once crept down from the polar ice caps and then retreated, shrinking more and more each year.

But not before carving out the very landscape we still live in.

A world where actors want to seem real.

And we want them to.

Most of the time when you want to watch a movie, don't you want to really believe that that person is the character?

Don't you want to get lost in it?

We live with the taste the method created and it's really true.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

I want to really, really encourage you to go out and buy Isaac Butler's book, The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act.

It is wonderful and it contains so many more stories, details, and history than we could possibly include here.

And its scope is honestly much, much bigger.

Go get it.

Throughout this episode, you also heard clips from a number of other documentaries.

PBS's American Masters episodes on Stella Adler, Awake and Dream, and Harold Klurman, A Life of the Theater.

There was also a couple snippets from the Lee Strasberg episode of the Fred Rogers series, Old Friends, New Friends.

They're all worth watch, honestly.

Decodering is written and produced by Willip Haskin.

This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano.

Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts.

Merritt Jacob is our technical director.

Thank you to Lo and Liu, Josh Levine, Benjamin Frisch, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

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