Brian Timoney’s World of Acting Show Episode 22: What is Method Acting? [0:00:00] One man – One mission: To rid the world of low-standard and mediocre acting, once and for all. Brian Timoney, the world’s leading authority on Method Acting, brings you powerful, impactful, volcanic acting and ‘business of acting’ techniques in his special Acting Podcasts. It’s Brian Timoney’s World of Acting – unplugged and unleashed. Brian: Hi everyone, and welcome onto today’s show – and I’m joined by Joe, Joe Ferrera. Welcome, Joe! Joe: Well, thank you for having me, Brian. It’s lovely to be here, as usual. Thank you. Brian: Great! Well, today we’re going to be talking about Method Acting – and this is something that we both know a lot about, Joe, it’s fair to say. Joe: Yes, we do, yes. Brian: Now, the reason why I talk about this is that there’s always things in the press about what they think Method Acting is – right? Joe: Yes. Brian: Not so long ago, Shia LaBeouf, who’s a great actor, but he removed a tooth, basically, to play a role… Joe: Yes, I did read about that, yes. Brian: …and they called it Method Acting. There’s been reports as well of people like, for example, Daniel Day-Lewis, another brilliant actor, staying in character 24/7 in order to play roles, and Robert De Niro becoming a taxi driver in order to play a www.worldofacting.com taxi driver, or a boxer. So, there’re all these different examples. Some are varying in extremity. I think the tooth-pulling one is my favourite. Joe: I think the tooth-pulling one has to be – we’ll have to really sort of dissect that and the thought process behind that, you know, yes, because there is something there that doesn’t really ring true to me and my ideas and feelings and concepts and thoughts about Method Acting, you know? Whereas the others seem to be so much more logical and so much more methodical in their approach: Daniel Day-Lewis staying in character and De Niro training like a boxer to play a boxer. Actually we had an example of Jake Gyllenhaal doing that in Southpaw as well; he really went after it. Brian: Completely, yes. [0:02:15] Joe: So, we’ve got some good examples Brian: Yes. These examples – what gets bandied around the media about “that is what Method Acting is”, and actually there’s some people who carry out some of these extreme approaches, who are not even Method actors but they get called Method because people think that’s what Method Acting is. So, I think it’s important that we redress it, Joe, right? Joe: Yes; let’s just try and redress this, yes. Brian: Pulling out a tooth, or staying in character 24/7, or going and actually doing the job for real really isn’t Method Acting. Joe: No. Brian: But we will talk – like you’ve alluded to – that there are some aspects of what those actors did, a little less severe than the tooth-pulling one, that actually do make a lot of logical sense and there’s a reason why they’re doing it. But, however, none of this was laid out by the inventor, if you like, of Method Acting, Lee Strasberg. He didn’t say you had to go and lose a lot of weight or gain a lot of weight, or pull a tooth out in order to be a Method actor. It’s a completely different ethos and thinking behind it. And I think the first thing to think about or remember about the Method is it is a process. www.worldofacting.com Joe: It is a process. Brian: It’s called Method Acting for a reason. So, there is a process that an actor goes through of various exercises that are constructed; they go through it in a logical sequence, in order to get actors to where they need to be quicker. Joe: Yes – which came stemming from an actor taking 20 years to build a career and being able to trust his instrument to the point – you know, Lee and some of the great acting coaches, including going back to Stanislavski, saw that actors started to become much, much better the further down their career. And basically they took what these great actors have learned over 20/25 years, towards the end of their career or towards a middle part of their career where they’d had the confidence and the trust in their instrument to be able to go after things, and condensed that and said, ‘Look; why wait all that time? Why suffer through all those bad shows when you can condense that and bring it – start early, start quickly with the right technique and the right methodology.’ And stemming back to the productions of the group theatre, where I remember distinctly that they put on a play that was set in a hospital, in a theatre, and all of the actors went and watched what doctors did and how they behaved. That seems to me very logical behaviour – and if you’re Robert de Niro and you’re going to play Jake LaMotta, and you want to play him to the best of your ability; or if you’re Daniel Day- Lewis and you’re going to play Abraham Lincoln, the weight of those two people and their history, it weighs heavy on me. If somebody wants to play me, or if somebody’s going to play you, Brian, we’d want them to do what? To be as authentic as they can in their representation, you know? [0:05:30] Brian: Yes, you’d want them to know you, yes. Joe: Within reason of course – there’s also artistic license as well. But if you’re going to do that, I’d want to be the best me that I was going to play, or the best other person. So that approach/Method seems to have been misconstrued in the media – again. They’re looking for something that really isn’t there, you know. I’m sure there are actors that are doing sort of crazy stuff out there and artists who are doing extreme artistic choices, and that doesn’t necessarily make them a good artist or a great method actor, because it really stems from us wanting to be really good at www.worldofacting.com something and really condensing the technique and being able to bring a certain artistry as early as we can to our work. That’s my idea of Method Acting. Brian: Yes; I totally agree with what you’re saying. I think that when we really look at what the Method is – and I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that when Stanislavski, and later Lee Strasburg, developed the Method, it was out of conversations with great actors. Joe: With great actors! Brian: So I’ve got a theory about this, Joe: I actually think that all great actors are Method actors. Joe: Totally, yes. Brian: Because what people don’t realise, actually, a lot of people don’t realise, is that when the Method was formed, it was formed out of conversations with great actors. Joe: Yes. Brian: So it wasn’t dreamt up by a Lee Strasburg or a Stanislavski in a dark room: ‘It sounds like a wicked idea!’ Joe: Yes, like, ‘Let’s put it together parts and make an auto-acting robot.’ It wasn’t. It stemmed from deep conversations with actors who had experienced their problems and were willing to share. Brian: And very experienced actors of the day that were very good actors – people like Eleonora Duse, who’s a famous Italian actress. And she explained, actually – it’s quite an interesting story, this because she explained the fact that the way that she worked was actually working with her life, her background, her experiences in order to fuel the experiences of the character. And I thought that was a big turnaround. But what is interesting is that nowadays, sometimes the Method gets vilified for the fact that actors use their own experiences in order to fuel the scene, create the scene, but actually, all we’re doing is doing what Lee Strasburg said: ‘Doing what great actors have always done.’ It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel. This is actually what they do. www.worldofacting.com [0:08:20] Joe: Absolutely, yes. Brian: But putting it into a methodology, putting it into a way so that, as you said, actors can get there quicker – so instead of spending 40/50 years working these things out, the Method condensed it so that new actors getting their hands on acting for the first time can get to that point much quicker. Joe: Yes – and with, hopefully, less heartache in terms of the learning curve. I mean, you’re always going to encounter problems in terms of problems that need solving as an actor, where you may be given a technical note from a director and you haven’t experienced that technique in terms of it’s a new camera or something like that, or a new stage setting, and the director’s saying, ‘Listen; I need you to come down that thing and say the line in that way, and try and…’ – and that’s going to give you a problem. And you need to be able to trust your instrument enough – and when we talk about “our instrument”, that’s what we use, is ourselves; that is our instrument – that you need to be able to call on that, without all the heartache and the pain of not knowing.