Andrew Garfield is a staunch believer in method acting, as long as you’re not “an a–hole,” like, say, Jared Leto, who sent his “Suicide Squad” costar a rat to get into character as the Joker.
Speaking on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Andrew Garfield said that people have the wrong idea about what “the method” actually is. “There’s been a lot of misconceptions around what method acting is, I think,” Garfield told Maron. “It’s not about being an a–hole to everyone on set. It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to, and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”
Method acting came out of the Actors’ Studio in the 1950s, with stars like Marlon Brando burning up stages and screens with the technique. Decades later, several actors still practice it, most notably Daniel Day-Lewis, who learned how to track and skin animals to prepare for “The Last of the Mohicans,” while, more recently, Lady Gaga said she had psychological issues after staying in character for her role as a murderous Italian wife for the entire shoot of “House of Gucci.”
Such well-publicized examples aren’t what the one-time Spider-Man thinks is real method acting. “I’m kind of bothered by this idea that ‘method acting’s f—ing pipes bulls—.’ No, I don’t think you know what method acting is if you’re calling it bullshit. Or you just worked with someone who claims to be a method actor that isn’t actually acting the method at all. And it’s also very private… I don’t want people to see the f—ing pipes of my toilet. I don’t want them to see how I’m making the sausage,” he said.
In other words, stay in character if you like, but be nice about it, people.
Garfield also told Maron that fasting and giving up sex for Martin Scorsese’s a “Silence” helped his performance as a 17th-century priest. “I had an incredibly spiritual experience. I did a bunch of spiritual practices every day, I created new rituals for myself. I was celibate for six months and fasting a lot because me and [co-star] Adam [Driver] had to lose a bunch of weight anyway … I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food for that period of time.”
The actor is nominated for an Emmy for his performance in Hulu’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” and received his second Oscar nomination earlier this year for “Tick, Tick… Boom!”
