The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Streetcar devastated you not only because you have watched the destruction of Blanche DuBois but because you, sitting in your chair in the dark, realize your own emotional complicity in her downfall.

Over the years to come, Olivier would become the Method’s foil in the public eye, the epitome of the English approach, one that was largely external, based on physical and vocal transformation and careful attention to the rhythms and sounds of the text. Brando, meanwhile, would become the symbol of the Americans: authentic, unpredictable, interior, and drawn from the self. This conflict between Brando and Tandy, America and England, is also the conflict between Stanley and Blanche. Blanche is all artifice. She describes Stanley derisively as “simple, straightforward, and honest,” to which he responds, “Lay your cards on the table.” Later, Blanche declares, “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” By the end of the play, in a kind of prophecy of things to come for the Method, Blanche has discovered that her artifice doesn’t work as well as she thinks it does, while the audience has discovered that Stanley’s authenticity is another kind of veneer.

Clift refused the old terms of Hollywood stardom. He would agree only to single-film contracts, and he took wildly different roles to demonstrate his variegated gifts. Over the first three years of his career, he played a well-meaning Boy Scout of a soldier (The Search), a rebellious and sexually ambiguous cowboy (Red River), a fortune-hunting cad on the prowl in nineteenth-century New York (The Heiress), and a romantic Air Force sergeant (The Big Lift). Little unites these roles beyond Clift’s magnetism, a charisma enabled by his mastery of what Stanislavski called “public solitude,” the art of appearing unaware of the gaze of the audience or movie camera. In 1951, Clift disappeared into the role of George Eastman in A Place in the Sun. Eastman is a young man on the make, lying his way from his working-class roots into the upper crust of American society and then murdering his way into staying there. Clift’s portrait of Eastman is so compelling because it is so compassionate; he refuses to judge his character or to foreshadow the darkness that lies within him. There’s nothing diabolical at first about Eastman’s charm as he manages to seduce Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and us. Yet Clift and director George Stevens articulate Eastman’s arc so clearly that by the time he commits murder, it feels inevitable. It’s a magnificent performance, the crowning achievement of the three years that established Clift as the greatest actor of his generation, an inspiration to count...

When the viewer finally gets to really see Marlon Brando, at exactly eleven minutes and fifty-six seconds into the film, he’s shot from Blanche’s point of view, captured in close-up right after he enters the Kowalski home. Immediately, even across the gulf of more than seventy years, the sense of a revolution taking place is palpable. It isn’t only that he’s beautiful—although he is, almost upsettingly so, and the camera ogles him again and again throughout the film as if driven wild by him. It’s the way Brando carries himself. He is masculine and feminine at the same time, forceful and graceful at once. He’s chewing gum, but it doesn’t look like an affectation. His clothes are stained with grime, but they don’t look like a costume. He seems to be Stanley Kowalski, the cocksure and charismatic king of his small and grubby domain.

You can watch Streetcar a dozen times and still pick up new nuances in Brando’s performance. His way with language is groundbreaking in its naturalism. He talks like a real person, throwing away lines and muddying his diction. The contrast with Vivien Leigh’s Blanche, who is a character of persona and affectation, could not be clearer. On Broadway, Blanche’s affectation was that of a classically trained English actress. In the film, Blanche’s affectation is that of the studio system actor of the 1930s and 1940s, but the fight remains the same: realism versus magic. Brando excels at one of the great challenges of acting: playing a loathsome and unintelligent character without judgment or irony. Stanley is clever—many abusers are—but he is none too smart. It would be easy to lampoon Stanley, and equally easy to try to make him sympathetic. Instead, Brando inhabits all aspects of him: the vulnerable little boy, the charming man’s man, and the terrifying brute. Few actors could pull off the moment with Stella (played by fellow Studio member Kim Hunter) when he tries to “enlighten” her on the Napoleonic Code with his mouth full of leftovers, or his protest that he is not an ape while he stands hunched over, his arms swaying and his jaw jutted out, exactly like an ape.

When A Streetcar Named Desire opened in September 1951, it was a hit with audiences, critics, and the industry. It won Oscars for Malden, Leigh, and Hunter, but not Brando or Kazan. Brando had yet to learn to play the Hollywood game. He openly disdained the movie business, and his naturalism may have alarmed a Hollywood caught in a transitional moment between acting styles. As for Kazan, he maintained that he was overlooked for political reasons.

Part of the power of Steiger’s performance came—as did Brando’s in Streetcar—from the way he talked. His lines were delivered not with the clipped and precise speech of a classically trained thespian like John Barrymore, but the way a real person might say them. Steiger mumbled. He threw words away. A sentence might be structured not around its punctuation but around the feelings burbling away beneath the words. Actors weren’t supposed to talk this way. With the advent of the talkies, the book Speak with Distinction and its author, Edith Skinner, became mainstays on Hollywood lots. Part of your acting education after you signed on with a studio involved retraining your voice so that you could speak properly. If your type was ethnic or urban like John Garfield and James Cagney, you could get away with having a bit of a localized accent, but you were still expected to articulate syllables clearly. If you wanted to play anyone of class, you were drilled in the “mid-Atlantic accent,” a way of speaking that was not quite American, not quite English, but somewhere in between. The mid-Atlantic accent was constructed, artificial, a barrier to the kind of authenticity that Method actors so ostentatiously prized. But to the Method’s increasing number of detractors, their “authentic” way of speaking violated every rule of good acting, which required the clear delivery of text. There was a class component to all of this. The complaint that Method actors could not speak well was also a...

“Marlon was never an active student of the Studio,” said Martin Balsam. “He went out the way he came in; that was his style.” Strasberg, however, was happy to claim Marlon Brando, the Greatest Actor Alive, as a lifetime member of the Studio. Brando never forgave him for it. He would later say that Strasberg “took credit for everything. He was a tasteless man. I didn’t like him very much at all … and he never taught me acting. Stella did. And Kazan.” Other Studio members mistrusted Strasberg but got swept up into the Method lineage. Karl Malden, who had hated working with Strasberg on Peer Gynt, later wrote, “Because I was around on the ground floor of the Actors Studio, people might assume that I would call myself a Method actor. But I don’t. I do have a method, of course. That is, any method that works.”

James Dean had more than his share of psychological problems. His mother, with whom he was close, died of uterine cancer when he was nine, and he was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Indiana. As a teenager, he may have been sexually abused by his pastor. He was, in the words of Carroll Baker, “a sad-faced, introverted oddball,” and he had a pronounced, almost performative, vulnerability. Although he had dropped out of college to become an actor, he hated being exposed, analyzed, or critiqued. Actors need to be able to adjust the thickness of their skin in order to survive, hardening themselves to the gaze of the public while becoming open and vulnerable for the sake of their work. James Dean never learned how to do this, and his inability to modulate himself led to strange and off-putting behavior. Once, Bobby Lewis asked James Dean to audition for his production of Teahouse of the August Moon. Bobby had seen Jimmy’s work and felt he could do the role, but Lewis couldn’t simply cast him by fiat, particularly as the character was Japanese. “Jimmy was paralyzed with fear when I told him to prepare a few lines of Sakini’s opening monologue,” Lewis recalled. When Dean got up onstage at the Martin Beck Theatre to deliver his monologue, he collapsed in a fit of laughter and ran offstage.

Many of Dean’s peers disliked him. He had a bratty streak, and his technique, such as it was, leaned heavily on his natural gifts, emphasizing spontaneity over rigor. Norma Connolly, who acted with Dean on television, said, “Jimmy was an asshole. He was also a trade kid. He would trade sexual favors to move up the ladder … he was a boring, tacky little boy.” She also remembered an Oscar party at which Dean, dressed in a T-shirt and desperate for attention, kept drumming on the host’s pots and pans and bragging about the size of his penis. Dean relented only when Marlon Brando entered the room. Dressed in a crisp suit, Marlon pointed to Dean’s T-shirt and said, “That was last year, Jimmy.” Accusations of copying Brando and Montgomery Clift dogged Dean’s brief career, in part because they were true. Dean phoned Clift regularly, trying to get the secret to his minimalist grace—the way Clift did everything just so without appearing to try too hard—but Clift refused to divulge his secrets. To study Brando’s mannerisms, Dean watched The Men again and again and read press reports about his idol’s research process. Brando, who responded to Dean’s entreaties for advice with a recommendation that the younger man see an analyst, was among those charging Dean with plagiarism. After seeing Dean in East of Eden, Brando remarked that the young actor was “wearing my last year’s wardrobe and using my last year’s talent.”

In both East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, Dean copies Brando’s voice and mannerisms, sprinkling them with a tablespoon or two of Montgomery Clift. In Dean’s hands, Brando’s and Clift’s performances are distilled into stylistic tics divorced from the substance that lent them their original power. Whereas Brando’s quiet moments are alive with the character’s thoughts, Dean’s register as pouty and withdrawn. Brando could take huge emotional risks because his performances remained rooted in character. By contrast, Dean’s famous “You’re tearing me apart!” scene at the beginning of Rebel Without a Cause appears unmotivated, exploding out of nowhere for its own sake.

Dean may have been one of these Xeroxes, but he had a profound effect on American culture and its view of the Method nonetheless. His performances, his “own personal rebellions,” shifted the Method subject from adulthood to late adolescence. In all three of Dean’s films, he rebels against a father figure who is incapable of loving him properly. From the vantage point of today, all three are odd symbols of nonconformity. Cal in East of Eden wants to fit in but is incapable of doing so. Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause states his cause explicitly within the film: He wants his father to be a traditional, firm-handed patriarch. Jim is the enforcer of cultural norms, not their destroyer. In Giant, Dean’s best film and performance, he’s a side character, and he spends much of the film as the drunken butt of everyone’s jokes.

By the time he appeared in The Misfits, Clift was more walking shade than man. Five years earlier, he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and plowed into a telephone pole. His injuries necessitated several surgeries and months of recovery, and he never looked the same again. In constant pain, stupefied by alcohol and drugs, and partially paralyzed on one side of his beautiful, expressive face, Clift lost his gift for public solitude. He could never again fully let go and be unselfconscious, and his performances became increasingly odder and more alienating. Kazan used this to incredible effect in Wild River, in which Clift’s inability to relate to those around him is his character’s central conflict.

For his first thirty years on this earth, Dustin Hoffman’s dream of being an actor seemed destined to remain unrealized. He had studied with Lee Strasberg and become a devotee of the Method, but he was too odd and too abrasive to get regular work. He had even been voted least likely to succeed when studying at the Pasadena Playhouse, and seemed poised to prove his peers right. Then, in 1966, Alan Arkin cast Hoffman in Eh?, a hit Off-Broadway comedy. Reviewers compared him to Buster Keaton, and he caught the eye of Mike Nichols, who was struggling to fill the role of The Graduate’s protagonist, Benjamin Braddock. Nichols flew Hoffman out to Los Angeles for an audition that the young actor would remember as “maybe one of the most demeaning I’ve ever had.”

The choice of Hoffman for the role of Benjamin Braddock defined Nichols’s take on the material. In both The Graduate’s screenplay and the novel on which it is based, Benjamin Braddock is rich, popular, a star athlete, and a Big Man on Campus. He’s not one of the Method’s grubby ethnics. But after auditioning actor after actor who beamed Kennedyesque certainty that the world belonged to him, Nichols realized the straightforward approach to the material would never work. Benjamin Braddock might be a WASP, but, as Nichols told Hoffman, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” The Graduate needed a lead performance that captured how Benjamin and his generation saw themselves—as misfits who, to paraphrase a song the Beach Boys had sung a year earlier, just weren’t made for these times.

To buy a ticket for The Godfather in 1972 meant that you would see not only the death of Don Corleone but also Marlon Brando’s passing of the Method torch to a new generation. Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, and James Caan, who played Kay, Tom Hagen, and Sonny Corleone, respectively, all studied with Sanford Meisner. John Cazale, who played Fredo, studied with Clifford Odets protégé Peter Meyer Kass at Boston University. And playing Michael Corleone, the anchor and protagonist of the family saga, was Al Pacino, one of Strasberg’s favorite finds.

De Niro’s approach did not always work. Later in his career, he struggled with playing normal people in films like Falling in Love, as if, when not called upon to craft a full transformation, he was unsure what to do. His process also required long lead times, and the willing participation of his collaborators in his search for truth. During the filming of Joe Pesci’s reaction shots during Raging Bull’s famous “You fuck my wife?” scene, De Niro ad-libbed “You fuck your mother?” to get a reaction he felt was suitably outraged. According to Jerry Lewis, during the filming of The King of Comedy, De Niro hurled anti-Semitic abuse at him, including “If Hitler had lived, he’d have gotten all you cocksuckers,” to provoke his co-star to an adequate level of rage. While De Niro denied doing more to Lewis than “bust his balls,” Lewis compared working with De Niro to “mak[ing] a deal with the devil,” because the actor “is no fool. He knows his craft,” and was willing to do just about anything to get results. During Midnight Run, De Niro requested that Charles Grodin wear real metal handcuffs, rather than prop rubber or plastic ones, for the sake of realism. Grodin, a student of Uta Hagen’s, acquiesced, and wound up with scars for his trouble. For Mike Nichols’s film of Neil Simon’s Bogart Slept Here, De Niro wanted to live on the set with Marsha Mason, the actress playing his wife (she demurred), couldn’t figure out how to make Simon’s highly technical comedy work, and tried to rewri...

Filming halted for four months so De Niro could eat his way through Italy and France, gaining sixty pounds in the process. The shift in physique changed everything. De Niro developed high blood pressure, began snoring, and had difficulty tying his shoes. He had rashes on his thighs, and his breathing became labored. For most people these physical consequences would be ample reason to reconsider their working methods, but De Niro claimed that “it was the best thing I could’ve done … Just by having the weight on, it made me feel a certain way and behave in a certain way.”

The most celebrated inheritor of De Niro’s techniques is the now retired Daniel Day-Lewis. To many, Day-Lewis is synonymous with the Method, but while preparing to play Christy Brown in My Left Foot, he told the New York Times “I don’t follow the Method. I don’t even have a normal way of working. I tend to be suspicious of all systems of acting.” If Day-Lewis represents the sublime form of De Niro’s process, examples of its more ridiculous versions abound. The promotional machine for the 2016 action blockbuster Suicide Squad generated numerous stories about Jared Leto, whose efforts to capture the Joker’s anarchic sensibility reportedly included sending his co-stars a dead pig, a live rat, dildos, and used condoms. Although Leto later said the used condom story “was total bullshit” and accused the press of disseminating it for clicks, he was one of the people spreading the story prior to the film’s release.

In The Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell had wondered whether America would have the stomach to live with the truths that the 1970s uncovered. First, in 1971, came the exposure of COINTELPRO, a decadeslong project within the FBI to disrupt dissident leftist organizations by illegally infiltrating and spying on them. That same year, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, revealing to America that its leaders had lied to the country about the war in Vietnam and knew it was unwinnable. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the investigations opened in the aftermath of the Watergate break-in. America would continue unveiling disturbing truths about itself a year later, when the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, began publishing its findings. Beyond revealing the scope of COINTELPRO in even greater detail, the Church Committee showed that the CIA conducted mind control experiments involving LSD and electroshock therapy on unsuspecting civilians, that the FBI had been opening Americans’ mail without warrants, that the government had spied on Martin Luther King Jr. and attempted to blackmail him, and that the NSA had instituted a massive spying operation conducted with the cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies.

The Method suffered instead the same fate that befell the postwar consensus in which it had been so firmly ensconced. Both began to lose their grip on America in the mid 1970s as the blockbuster, the inflation crisis, and revelations of decades of government wrongdoing struck the nation simultaneously; both stumbled in the 1980s, punch-drunk and overmatched by a new vision of American society and its citizens. Before, our tax dollars went to advance the common good; now they would be returned to us so we could express ourselves through our purchasing power—helping others, the conventional wisdom went, through helping ourselves. Before, we were bound in common cause—individuals, yes, but part of a society and dedicated to its advancement; we were now to be consumers in a marketplace. This central metaphor of society as a market made up of citizen-customers seeking self-gratification may have been right-wing, but it intersected quite neatly with the liberal left’s project of individualizing higher education. Beginning with the revival of progressive education in the 1960s, America’s schools grew more interested in allowing diversity of thought, disrupting canons, and hosting disagreements about every facet of American life—including acting, which had, for decades, been bound by the dogmas of the various post-Stanislavski gurus and their opponents.

Meryl Streep won her first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, for Kramer vs. Kramer, a 1979 film in which she battled Dustin Hoffman onscreen and off. Hoffman and Streep’s conflict was an inverse of the Tandy/Brando rows during A Streetcar Named Desire. Now it was Hoffman, the Method actor, in the Tandy role, holding on to an old-fashioned way of working, while Streep played Brando, a natural genius rejecting everything the established star stood for. In Kramer, Hoffman and Streep played a divorcing couple warring over custody of their son. Prior to the action of the film, Hoffman’s Ted Kramer was neglectful and self-centered, taking his family for granted. His wife, Joanna, played by Streep, leaves him, and in her absence he must learn to accommodate, and then truly father, their son, Billy. Joanna is gone for much of the film. When she returns, she sets in motion the film’s final act by asking Ted to dinner and demanding custody of Billy. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which Joanna shows how far she has grown offscreen, while Ted, who reacts by throwing a glass against a wall in a restaurant and shattering it, shows how much farther he has to go. Hoffman’s glass throwing was improvised, and genuinely frightening, dusting Streep’s hair with fragments of broken glass. The incident is one of many times over the course of Kramer vs. Kramer when the actors’ contrasting styles led to on-set clashes. Like Ted, Hoffman needed to control the environment to get what he felt were...

With Sophie’s Choice, which garnered Streep the Best Actress Oscar a few years later, she showed that she could also design a De Niro–style transformation. For the role of Sophie, a Polish Holocaust survivor caught in a love triangle between Kevin Kline’s Nathan and Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, Streep gained weight and studied Polish for months to learn the accent and language. On set, she wore false teeth, because, as writer/director Alan Pakula explained it, “Sophie would have lost all her teeth in the concentration camp. It was remarkable. And when she spoke Polish, she looked different.” When production moved to the flashback sequences set in the concentration camps, Streep lost more than twenty pounds and learned to speak German. As Streep was influenced, so she became an influence on other actors. Her work on Sophie’s Choice was an important bridge between De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis, and Al Pacino would later credit Sophie’s Choice with inspiring his work on Scarface. He admired, and wanted to draw from, her “way of involving herself in playing someone who is from another country and another world [which] was particularly fine and committed and … courageous.” But Streep did not settle into a single technique in role after role. Instead, she reinvented her process again and again, depending on the particular challenge of the character she had decided to play. There was, for Streep, and for much of America, no One True Process.

As America fractured, so did the monolithic audience. We became a nation of micro-demographics, catered to by the multiplex, the home video market, and cable television, all new developments that helped finance an enormous boom in film production. Hiding in the shadow cast by the super-blockbuster was an era of surprising variety. The 1980s was the decade of Top Gun and E.T., but it was also the decade of John Sayles, the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Michael Mann, and other idiosyncratic directors. Many of these directors were stylists rather than narrative realists, embracing non-naturalistic filming methods and acting approaches.

That’s the question provoked by Acting Emotions, a study by actor turned research scientist Dr. Elly A. Konijn. Intrigued by the twentieth century’s acting debates over emotions and “being in character,” Konijn set out to discover what professional actors actually do, and what happens to them while they do it. The existing studies showed that there was “no scientific support in the actual practice of acting for the idea that actors do identify with their characters.” The best she could find was a study that “found that method-actors, as compared to non-method-actors, had a higher degree of control over their galvanic skin reactions (sweating).” Konijn sent out a twenty-page questionnaire to professional actors in the Netherlands and the United States, asking them about the emotions of their characters, and the emotions they themselves experienced while playing them. The results “clearly show that the actors’ emotional experiences did not correspond with the portrayed character-emotions.” Actors felt real feelings, but those feelings seldom aligned with their characters’. Konijn separated her respondents further into “detachment” actors (those who technically represent their character and behavior) and “involvement” actors (actors in the Stanislavski lineage). But it turned out that even “the strongest adherents” of Method acting “do not differ from the results of the group as a whole.” Regardless of approach, there was “no correspondence between character-emotions and the ...

The rise of identity politics has created a new challenge to the Method, as teachers and theorists have asked much-needed questions about both the technique of engaging with past traumas and the frequently gendered and racialized assumptions behind the Method’s ideas of authenticity and truth. After the election of Donald Trump and the birth of the Me Too movement, the Method’s long history as a vehicle for workplace and classroom abuse has only further hurt its prestige.

The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices on display are big, simple, and clearly communicated. Modern acting—in Stella Adler’s formulation—evolved to show the fundamental mysteriousness, the inconclusiveness, the insolvability of human beings and their problems in the twentieth century. Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience. While there is a kind of Chekhovian countermovement that journeys farther into mystery, lengthy pauses, seeming plotlessness, and the rhythms and desperations of real life, it is decidedly in the minority. This leads to the postmodern actor’s paradox: At a time when everything feels a little bit inauthentic, we crave simplified, clear acting that presents characters as coherent and easily knowable. We crave, in other words, a comforting lie about who we are.