“Listen, I worked with Brian Cox once and got somehow drawn into this handbags-at-dawn conflict inadvertently. Brian is a very fine actor who’s done extraordinary work. As a result, he’s been given a soapbox… which he shows no sign of climbing down from. Any time he wants to talk about it, I’m easy to find,” Day-Lewis told Big Issue magazine, somewhat menacingly. “If I thought during our work together I’d interfered with his working process, I’d be appalled. But I don’t think it was like that. So I don’t know where the fuck that came from. Jeremy Strong is a very fine actor, I don’t know how he goes about things, but I don’t feel responsible in any way for that.”
As Day-Lewis previously stated, Method acting is not a cult that he has induced acolytes like Strong to join. Nor does he believe that it has a big impact on his co-stars. (Strong would agree: “It’s a very solitary thing. I think there’s very low impact on others except for what they might want to project onto it and how that might make them feel,” he said in 2023.) Day-Lewis feels the Method has been “misrepresented” by critics who don’t have “any understanding of how it works and the intention behind it.” Antics like living in a jail cell for six months (for In The Name Of The Father) “are the least important details,” Day-Lewis claimed. “In all the performing arts, people find their methods as a means to an end. It’s with the intention of freeing yourself so you present your colleagues with a living, breathing human being they can interact with. It’s very simple.”
The disdain for going full method “pisses [Day-Lewis] off” because “it’s invariably attached to the idea of some kind of lunacy.” But the venerated Oscar winner himself seems to have a fair amount of disdain for his less serious peers, to hear him tell it. “I choose to stay and splash around, rather than jump in and out or play practical jokes with whoopee cushions between takes or whatever people think is how you should behave as an actor,” he concluded. That kind of scorn isn’t going to help Method shake its pretentious reputation, but Day-Lewis has certainly earned himself some pretensions.
