Women have always ‘method acted’ – they just don’t get called geniuses for it

In a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, actor Anya Taylor-Joy offered an explanation for why so few women are “method actors”: women, in her words, “can’t completely lose our minds”.

Natalie Portman has said method acting is a “luxury women can’t afford”.

Kristen Stewart made the same argument .

Method acting, as it is popularly understood, is not a stable, agreed-upon category.

It is a retrospective label stitched together from a handful of anecdotes – Daniel Day-Lewis having crew spoon-feed him in character during the filming of My Left Foot (1989), or Jim Carrey staying “as” Andy Kaufman between takes on Man on the Moon (1999).

It is true Hollywood lionises men for going to extremes, and would call a woman doing the same thing “difficult” or “unhireable”.

And it is true these actors are naming a very real sexism that occurs in Hollywood and in the Hollywood press.

But these critiques of method acting misunderstand what method acting is – and dismiss the women who practise it.

Stanislavski’s ‘system’ What gets casually called “the Method” traces back to Konstantin Stanislavski’s “system”.

Stanislavski was a Russian actor and director who, with the playwright and producer Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 .

The pair were frustrated with the melodrama and repertoire of external poses that dominated Russian theatre at the time.

Stanislavski wanted actors to locate something like real feeling, generated from within, and let expression follow from it.

Stanislavskiy, centre, with members of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1922.

Wikimedia Commons Stanislavski believed actors could build authentic feeling through the body and imagination together, not summoned on command.