There’s been a lot of talk about Method acting over the last couple years, but there’s just one problem: Almost all of it has gotten it wrong. No, someone like Jeremy Strong isn’t “going Method” by staying in character (or something like it), and even he admits his method (lower case) has little to do with the practice developed by Konstantin Stanislavski. Andrew Garfield even said as much on a new episode of WTF with Marc Maron — then talked about some pretty crazy stuff he once did for a role that people think is Method.
So who did the erstwhile Spider-Man go faux-Method for? Why, Martin Scorsese, of course. Garfield starred in 2016’s Silence, the director’s solemn, haunting epic about Portuguese Jesuit priests who find themselves in danger in 17th century Japan. To get into the ascetic swing of things, the actor went so far as to do two things: he fasted and he went celibate for six whole months. If that sounds like a drag, well, it wasn’t, at least for him.
“It was very cool, man,” Garfield told Maron. “I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food at that time.”
Garfield also tried to set the record straight about Method acting, and he tried to separate what it really is from, say, Jared Leto taking ages to use the toilet.
“There [have] been a lot of misconceptions about what method acting is, I think,” said Garfield. “People are still acting in that way, and it’s not about being an asshole to everyone on set. It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”
Garfield said he’s “kind of bothered by the misconception” people have of it, “this idea that ‘method acting is f*cking bulls*it.’” He said, “No, I don’t think you know what method acting is if you’re calling it bulls*it, or you just worked with someone who claims to be a method actor who isn’t actually acting the method at all.”
That said, he didn’t want to go into whatever version of the Method he uses, saying it’s “very private,” and he doesn’t “want people to see the f*cking pipes of my toilet. I don’t want them to see how I’m making the sausage.”
You can listen to Garfield’s WTF appearance here.
(Via Variety)
