Daniel Day-Lewis insists Method acting isn't a "cult," says critics just don't get it

However you feel about the immersive, somewhat controversial technique, it’s clearly worked for Day-Lewis. He’s won three Best Actor Oscars throughout his career (for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, and Lincoln) and has been nominated for three more. Some such as actor David Harbour have even held him up as a rare exception to their personal philosophy that Method acting is mostly just madness. To Day-Lewis, on the other hand, it’s really quite simple. “It’s very easy to describe what I do as if I’m out of my mind. Plenty of people have been happy to do that, but it just makes sense to me,” he said. “You have an obligation to try to understand as far as you’re humanly able to what it feels like to be inside of that experience.” The actor also pushed back against the claim that immersing yourself in a role means “you’re sealed off from experiencing” your own life. It actually means “you’re in a self-contained experience of your own,” he said. “But really, if you’ve done your work, you should be free to accept whatever passes through you.” 

The acclaimed actor recently ended his “retirement” to co-write and star in his son Ronan Day-Lewis’ directorial debut, Anemone. In the film, he “unsurprisingly… delivers every line with masterful, lived-in magnetism,” as Luke Hicks wrote in his review of the surreal project for The A.V. Club. Ronan had never experienced his father’s techniques from behind the camera before, but backed up his claim that immersion in a character doesn’t mean you’re fully cut off from the reality of the world around you. In a recent interview with The A.V. Club, the younger Day-Lewis said he wasn’t expecting how “collaborative [Daniel] was able to be on set, despite how fully enmeshed in his character he was.” He added, “That was amazing to see and very reassuring early on in the shoot.”