Brando to De Niro to Day-Lewis. A working history of the most-influential acting approach of the past seventy-five years — and the debate about whether it's helped or hurt cinema.
The Method — the acting technique developed by Lee Strasberg and others at the Actors Studio in 1940s and 1950s New York — has been the dominant approach to American screen acting for almost seventy-five years. Its practitioners include some of the most-respected performers in modern cinema. Its critics include almost everyone who has had to work with a Method actor on a film set in the past forty years.
This essay traces the technique's history, its peaks, and the contemporary backlash.
Before the Method became dominant in American film acting, the prevailing tradition was the British classical-theatre approach: technical, externally-driven, focused on voice and gesture. Laurence Olivier was the standard-bearer. The actor was a craftsman who applied technique to a role from the outside — choosing physical and vocal choices that produced the desired emotional effect in the audience without necessarily requiring the actor's own emotional experience.
This approach is sometimes summarised by an apocryphal exchange between Olivier and Dustin Hoffman during the Marathon Man (1976) shoot. Hoffman, allegedly, had stayed awake for seventy-two hours to play a character who had been awake for seventy-two hours. Olivier, according to the story, asked: 'My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?' Whether the exchange happened or not, it has become the canonical shorthand for the divide.
The Method's roots are in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian theatre director and theorist whose late-19th and early-20th-century writings developed a system of acting based on the actor's emotional memory and identification with the character. Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares (1936) became the foundational text.
Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner — all teachers in the American Group Theatre of the 1930s — developed three related but distinct variants of Stanislavsky for American actors. Strasberg's version, taught at the Actors Studio in New York from 1947 onwards, became the dominant American interpretation. The 'Strasberg Method' emphasised the actor's use of their own emotional memory to access the character's emotional states. The actor was not performing emotions; the actor was producing them from their own life.
Adler's variant emphasised imagination and circumstantial research over emotional memory. Marlon Brando, the most-famous early Method actor, was in fact an Adler student rather than a Strasberg one — a distinction that has often been overlooked. Meisner's variant emphasised reactive listening between scene partners.
The Method became culturally visible in American cinema through Elia Kazan's films of the early 1950s. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954). James Dean in East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Montgomery Clift across his early films. The acting style — interior, mumbled, organically physical — was visibly different from the British-trained classical tradition the studios had been working in.
What audiences responded to was the perceived emotional authenticity. The Method's argument was that classical-tradition actors were 'indicating' emotions while Method actors were 'having' them. The films supported the argument. Brando in On the Waterfront delivered the most-quoted single piece of American film acting of the 1950s — the 'I coulda been a contender' taxi-cab scene — and it landed because Brando's interior life was visibly engaged in a way no British classical actor of the period was attempting.
By the 1970s, the Method had become the default approach to American screen acting. Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976), gaining sixty pounds for Raging Bull (1980). Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Godfather (1972). Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (1976) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
The New Hollywood directors — Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet, Mike Nichols — were uniformly working with Method-trained actors. The era's films are unimaginable without the technique. The peak coincides with what most surveys consider the strongest decade in modern American cinema.
By the 1990s, the Method had developed a particular extreme-immersion variant most-associated with Daniel Day-Lewis. The actor stays in character throughout the production. Day-Lewis reportedly remained in character as Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) for the entire shoot, learning to track and skin game between takes. As Lincoln (2012), he insisted cast and crew address him as 'Mr. President.' As Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007), he reportedly remained in character for months.
Day-Lewis won three Best Actor Oscars (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln) — the only male performer in Academy history to do so. The technique is, in some sense, the Method's logical extreme: total immersion in the role's interior life.
The 2010s and 2020s have seen a significant backlash against extreme Method practice. The triggering incident was Jared Leto's reported on-set behaviour during the production of Suicide Squad (2016) — sending the cast a dead pig, a dead rat, used condoms, and other 'gifts' as Joker — which most non-Method colleagues found professionally inappropriate rather than artistically serious.
Subsequent reporting on Method-actor production behaviour has raised broader questions. Whiplash's J.K. Simmons explicitly stated he is not a Method actor. Anya Taylor-Joy has spoken about how the Method's centring of the lead actor's process can devalue the rest of the ensemble. Mads Mikkelsen called extreme Method practice 'bullshit' in a widely-shared 2022 interview.
The underlying argument is that the Method's emphasis on individual emotional experience can produce great individual performances at the cost of the rest of the production. The actor's process becomes the production's centre; everyone else accommodates. The films can be great; the working environments are often not.
As of 2026, the Method is in a contested position. The technique continues to produce major performances. Daniel Day-Lewis, post-2017, has not announced a return from his retirement, but Joaquin Phoenix's Joker work, Christian Bale's various transformations, and Adrien Brody's recent Brutalist lead are all in the tradition's lineage. At the same time, the cultural patience for production-disrupting Method behaviour has measurably diminished.
The likely future is a working synthesis. The technique's strengths — psychological depth, organic physicality, emotional authenticity — are likely to remain dominant in serious dramatic acting. The technique's excesses — the extreme-immersion practices, the production-disruption — are likely to be progressively constrained by working norms that the next generation of actors will inherit.