The Dangers of Method Acting: Actors Who Lost Themselves in Their Roles
It's possible to take character acting too far.
Acting is a strange trade.
By nature of the profession, an actor is supposed to don various masks, completely immerse themselves in a role to the point that they can convince audiences that they're someone else entirely, then discard it all as soon as the show or movie is done—only to start up again as a different character.
Many actors do this effortlessly, but others have dived too deep into their roles, losing touch with their real selves in the process. These actors have taken character acting a bit too far.
1. Joaquin Phoenix — Joker
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Joaquin Phoenix confessed that preparing himself for Joker was no easy task. He lost 52 pounds in six months, which is incredibly dangerous, and he found himself fatigued and socially ostracized and on the verge of going "mad." Of course, the Joker is a famously destructive and all-consuming part. For his role as the Clown Prince of Crime in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger locked himself in a hotel room for a month; and for the same role in Suicide Squad, Jared Leto adopted the Joker's twisted personality, sending bizarre gifts and playing strange pranks on the film's cast and crew.
▲2. Nicolas Cage — Birdy
Nicolas Cage is well-known for his strange antics, and he's pulled a variety of stunts to get in character over the years. For his film Birdy, he had four teeth pulled out in order to add effect to his character's appearance, and he wore the character's facial bandages for five weeks straight on and off set. "I could have taken those bandages off, but I didn't. I left them on for five weeks," he told The New York Times in 1984. "I slept in them. I'd wake myself up in the middle of the night and say, 'Don't sleep on that side; that's the side that was hurt.'
Cage has continued his shenanigans in the decades that followed that performance. In general, he follows a method called "nouveau-shamanic,," a made-up acting technique that he described as "trying to augment your imagination to get to the performance without feeling like you're faking it." He elaborated that nouveau shamanic-technique cannot be taught, but must be discovered.▲3. Michelle Williams — My Week With Marilyn
For her role as the iconic sex symbol, Michelle Williams spent weeks listening to transcripts of Marilyn Monroe speaking. She also took things a bit further—even tying a belt around her legs in order to force herself to walk like Marilyn. "There was a sort of a sense of a figure eight to her walk, that her shoulders were back, it looked like she had a sort of – like a balloon was attached to her breastbone," she told CBS. "That was the work that I wanted to start as early as possible, because I don't want any of those thoughts to be anywhere in my mind when I'm in the middle of a scene."
▲4. Jim Carrey — Man on the Moon
Jim Carrey refused to break character as comedian Andy Kaufman while filming Man on the Moon. "Jim Carrey didn't exist at the time," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "It was psychotic at times." As Variety writes, Carrey and Kaufman had more in common than one would think: "Andy Kaufman's comedy emerged from his pathological role-playing, which was built around his weak sense of identity and his consuming need to create one," it reads. "It turns out that Jim Carrey overlapped him in that department quite a bit."
Carrey's method acting was filmed and used for a new documentary about the making of the movie, called Jim & Andy: The Making of the Beyond.
▲5. Jamie Foxx — Ray
For his role in the Ray Charles biopic, Foxx lost 30 pounds and wore prosthetic eyelids 14 hours a day during the entire filming process, which caused him to experience panic attacks on set during the first two weeks. Foxx also played all the piano parts in the film.
▲6. Val Kilmer — The Doors
To become Jim Morrison, Val Kilmer spent months emulating the singer's voice, actions, and personality. He got so good at it that when members of the actual band heard Kilmer singing their songs, they couldn't tell his voice from Morrison's.
When the film was done, Kilmer had to go to intensive therapy in order to extricate himself from Morrison's reality.▲7. Kate Winslet — The Reader
Winslet won an Oscar for her role as Nazi camp guard Hannah Schmitz, but the role apparently left her traumatized for months. "Once you see documentary footage of the camp, you read anything on the Holocaust, you can never un-see those things, you can never un-hear, un-read them. I'm still absolutely traumatized by so much of what I saw during the preparation process," she told The Huffington Post. Apparently, the reverberations of the role continued long after the movie was wrapped, and the experience left Winslet feeling like "some car crash victim who somehow hadn't been hurt on the outside, but I felt like I couldn't speak [about it]," she said. "It was truly overwhelming. I really went somewhere. I was in some kind of a trance. And I'm still coming to terms with all of it."
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