10 Actors With Extreme Method Acting Stories

The Stanislavsky Method, also known simply as method acting, refers to a school of thought that actors should try to inhabit their characters as fully as possible. Rather than simply acting out the words and emotions they are portraying, actors should actually feel those things, getting themselves as fully into the mind of their role as they can. Over the years, this has come to mean that method actors try to stay in character as much as possible, even when the cameras aren’t rolling.

Modern method acting is, understandably, controversial. It can make sets a difficult place to work, selfishly wrapping co-stars and even crew members into an actor’s preparation process. Natalie Portman made a great point too, when she told The Wall Street Journal that method isn’t a technique available to everybody. “I’ve gotten very into roles, but I think it’s honestly a luxury that women can’t afford. I don’t think that children or partners would be very understanding of, you know, me making everyone call me ‘Jackie Kennedy’ all the time,” she said. 

There’s also an infamous Tinseltown anecdote about Dustin Hoffman’s behavior on the set of “Marathon Man.” After he told Laurence Olivier that he’d stayed up for 72 hours to get in the mindset of his sleep-deprived character, the older actor reportedly replied, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”

Nevertheless, the method continues to fascinate fans. Stories of on-set deep dives make for great press tour anecdotes, meaning many actors love to brag about their method. Here are 10 actors who got way too into it.

Daniel Day-Lewis is well-known as one of the pre-eminent method actors in the business. While filming “Lincoln,” Day-Lewis stayed in character the whole time, even reportedly texting his co-stars as the 16th President. That movie came out in 2012, but Day-Lewis has been going full method for a long time. One of his most devoted performances came early in his career, in “My Left Foot.”

In the 1989 film, Day-Lewis plays Christy Brown, a man with cerebral palsy. He stayed in character on that set, too, and he refused to do anything that his character wouldn’t have been able to do. Co-star Kirsten Sheridan told The Guardian in 2001 that Day-Lewis required the other actors to help him around, including spoon-feeding him his meals. “It was madness,” she said. “You’d be feeding him, wheeling him around. During the entire film, I only saw him walking once.”

The character uses a wheelchair, and Day-Lewis’s insistence on staying hunched over in the chair wound up taking a physical toll on his body. He damaged his ribs thanks to his approach to the character, but hey, it all seems to have paid off: Day-Lewis won his first Oscar for his part in “My Left Foot.”

At this point in his career, Shia LaBeouf is as famous for his many controversies — both on- and off-set — as he is for his commitment to his craft. Sometimes, those things coincide, as when he went full method on the set of “Fury.” The brutal war movie, which trended on Netflix in 2024, features LaBeouf and co-stars like Brad Pitt and Jon Bernthal as an elite tank team during WWII. Things go incredibly sideways, and LaBeouf decided to get in character by really injuring himself. “He takes out a knife and cuts his face,” Logan Lerman recalled in a 2014 interview with British GQ (via The Guardian). “And for the whole movie he kept opening these cuts on his face. That’s all real.”

In addition to skipping showers so he’d be believably dirty, LaBeouf decided to have a tooth removed for real. He told Jimmy Kimmel (via Business Standard) that he struggled to find a dentist who was willing to remove the tooth for him. “It’s not like you can go to some dentist and go in there, like: ‘Hey, I wanna get this tooth taken out,'” he said. “They’re like, ‘You wanna do what? That doesn’t make any medical sense at all.'” Ultimately, he found someone willing to help him out. “I found a guy in Reseda next to a Radio Shack,” he revealed, “and he didn’t ask too many questions.”

When the first look at Jared Leto’s “Suicide Squad” Joker was revealed, fans roundly mocked the “Damaged” tattoo scrawled across his forehead. This Joker, people feared, was going to be edgier than ever before, and also cringier. It seems that Leto took the assignment to heart, getting far too into character as the iconic Batman villain by basically harassing his co-stars.

“I did a lot of things to create a dynamic, to create an element of surprise, a spontaneity and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there,” Leto explained to E! News in 2016. That’s dramatically underselling it. Leto sent his fellow actors a number of “gifts” while filming the movie, including anal beads, Playboy magazines described as “sticky,” used condoms, and a dead pig. The latter especially disturbed Viola Davis, who told Vanity Fair, “That was our introduction into Jared Leto. Now I’m terrified … thinking, is he crazy? … Talk about commitment!”

Will Smith reflected on his scene partner’s antics in a red carpet interview with E! News, joking, “Jared has gone full Joker. He went full Joker, you know? And the rule generally is, never go full Joker.” Still, it seems that Smith respected Leto’s approach. “He was dead serious as an actor,” he added. “He really jarred the rest of us into, okay, he’s not fooling around, so we need to get it right.”

Andy Kaufman was known for his commitment to the bit, frequently inhabiting various personas so fully that he refused to ever break character. When Jim Carrey shot a biopic about the iconic comedian called “Man on the Moon,” he took inspiration from his character and never let the Kaufman persona drop.

That meant pranking other people on set. Understandably, his co-stars were none too pleased about this, as Paul Giamatti revealed in a 2013 interview with Buzzfeed. “When he was [Kaufman alter-ego] Tony Clifton, he had cheese — Limburger cheese — in his pockets so he smelled horrible. And he’d constantly be hugging people, and he had it all over his hands and stuff,” Giamatti recalled. “It was disgusting. He was touching people and making them shake his hands all the time. He smelled horrible. Like, really bad.”

Carrey’s method performance was so complex and strange, in fact, that there’s an entire documentary about his approach. The 2017 film “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond” draws upon hours of behind-the-scenes footage of Carrey on set, doing everything he could to stay in character. The doc even shows a fight between Carrey-as-Kaufman and wrestler Jerry Lawler, who seems to have hated the experience. “He really believed he was channeling Andy Kaufman and that Andy’s spirit or soul went into his body and that he was a combination of Jim and Andy,” Lawler told AL.com. “Jim Carrey has never been the same since.”

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is an epic retelling of The King’s life, spanning decades from his discovery up through his death. Austin Butler stars in the titular role, giving such a committed performance that he was nominated for the Academy Award. As he promoted the film, however, fans realized something strange: Butler, it seemed, was unable to shake his Elvis voice. From red carpet interviews to late-night talk show appearances, Butler still sounded like he was about to end every sentence with a deep-voiced, “Thankyouverymuch.”

“I didn’t see my family for about three years,” Butler told Janelle Monáe in a 2022 joint interview for Variety. “I had months where I wouldn’t talk to anybody. And when I did, the only thing I was ever thinking about was Elvis. I was speaking in his voice the whole time.”

The lingering Elvis voice wasn’t just in the fans’ imagination. Butler himself was well aware of the fact that he’d altered his own speaking voice, meaning that he had to do some serious work once it was time to start filming other projects. In a 2024 appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” star confessed, “I had a dialect coach just help me not sound like Elvis.” Thankfully, Butler ditched the accent in time for “Dune 2.”

Lady Gaga’s press tour for “A Star Is Born” is almost as iconic as the film itself. After all, she taught us an important lesson: There can be a hundred people in a room, and ninety-nine don’t believe in you, but the important thing is that one does, and that was Bradley Cooper’s Jackson Maine. When she was cast in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci,” fans wondered whether she’d be able to top her zany interviews. Sure enough, Gaga spent that press tour describing her commitment to the role of the murderous Patrizia Reggiani, to the point where it sounds like Gaga experienced a slow descent into madness.

“I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her for a year and a half,” the “Disease” singer revealed to British Vogue in 2021. “I spoke with an accent for nine months of that … I never broke.” Staying in character took its toll, and Gaga experienced what she called “psychological difficulty” as filming dragged on. “I went out into Italy one day with a hat on to take a walk. I hadn’t taken a walk in about two months and I panicked. I thought I was on a movie set,” she said.

Eventually, Gaga feared the real-life Reggiani was out for revenge. She told an interviewer that she was swarmed by flies on set, believing that the murderous fashionista had somehow sent the insects to torture her … proving that you can, indeed, go too method.

Meryl Streep’s Oscar-nominated turn as Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada” is one of the film’s most memorable aspects. She’s perfectly acerbic as the demanding editor of a fashion magazine, dryly insulting Anne Hathaway’s character Andy any chance she gets. Sometimes it’s a cutting remark and sometimes it’s just a withering glance, but Streep is always dialed in, fully inhabiting one of cinema’s most delicious villains. In fact, Streep drew inspiration from two iconic Hollywood men – Clint Eastwood and director Mike Nichols — for her performance, crafting a character all her own instead of making her a simple stand-in for Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

All that character work came with consequences. Because Miranda towers over the other characters, Streep cut herself off from her castmates during filming, intentionally intimidating other co-stars like Hathaway. “I did feel intimidated, but I always felt cared for,” Hathaway told Entertainment Weekly in 2021. “I knew that whatever she was doing to create that fear, I appreciated [because] I also knew she was watching out for me.”

Streep ultimately regretted her approach to the film. “It was horrible! I was [miserable] in my trailer,” she told the same outlet. “I could hear them all rocking and laughing. I was so depressed! I said, ‘Well, it’s the price you pay for being boss!; That’s the last time I ever attempted a method thing!”

Adrien Brody won an Oscar for his role in “The Pianist.” His character is a Holocaust survivor named Wladyslaw Szpilman, a musician who spends the war years shut away in the ghettos of Warsaw. To get in character as a man who loses everything, Brody himself decided to give up nearly everything he had. “I sold my car,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2003, admitting that he stripped a number of crucial belongings out of his life to understand what his character must have experienced. “I figured: I don’t want to have a safe place to think of or possessions that I know I can go home to,” he said. “I wanted them to be taken away.”

It’s a physically demanding role too, and over the course of the film, Szpilman seems to waste away. He was, after all, starving, and that meant Brody needed to lose a significant amount of weight for the part. Instead of doing it in a safe, healthy way, Brody decided to replicate his character’s experience. In other words, he wanted not only to lose weight but also to experience starvation. “There is an emptiness that comes with really starving that I hadn’t experienced. I couldn’t have acted that without knowing it,” he told BBC News that year. “I’ve experienced loss, I’ve experienced sadness in my life, but I didn’t know the desperation that comes with hunger.”

It’s no secret that James Franco idolizes James Dean, having played the “Rebel Without a Cause” star in a 2001 biopic. Though Dean’s approach wasn’t quite “method” as we think of it today, he’s widely considered one of the original method actors, having come up in the time of Marlon Brando. (Brando, for his part, didn’t like Dean.) It’s no surprise that Franco has tried to emulate his idol’s technique, including diving too deep … occasionally to the detriment of his co-stars.

On the set of the 2006 film “Annapolis,” Franco’s insistence on staying in character annoyed his fellow actors, including Tyrese Gibson, who had to act out several fight scenes with his co-star. In 2007, Gibson told Elle that if given the chance, he’d like to see Franco’s house blown up. “James Franco is a method actor. I respect method actors, but he never snapped out of character,” he said. “Whenever we’d have to get in the ring for boxing scenes … the dude was full-on hitting me. I was always like, ‘James, lighten up, man. We’re just practicing.’ He never lightened up.”

Franco came just short of apologizing to Gibson. “I take full blame for any problems on that film,” he told GQ in 2008. “If he had a bad experience working with me, I was probably a jerk.” He made no apologies, though, for his various sexual misconduct allegations and lawsuits. In 2024, he told Variety, “It is what it is.”

On a BBC drama called “The Fall,” “50 Shades of Grey” star Jamie Dornan plays Paul Spector, a charismatic stalker and serial killer who catches the attention of a detective played by Gillian Anderson. The show is atmospheric and uncomfortable, exactly like a thriller about an evil man like this should be.

Though he’s great in the part, Dornan apparently went a bit too far while playing the character. Fascinated by Spector’s obsession with stalking, Dornan decided to do a bit of the stuff himself. He was hesitant about confessing this to the Los Angeles Times in 2015, finally admitting, “This is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that.” He spotted her on the London Underground, tracking her footsteps from the train station all the way to her apartment.

Dornan claimed that stalking someone did indeed help him see where his character was coming from. “It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way. I’m sort of not proud of myself. But I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I’ve obviously never done any of that,” he said. “It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of ‘what are you following her for?’ and ‘what are you trying to find out?'” Hopefully, Dornan found out he didn’t need to do that again.