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 lionizes 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.
Stanislavski believed actors could build authentic feeling through the body and imagination together, not summoned on command. This cut against his contemporaries, who believed great acting was a matter of technical control over voice and gesture, rather than genuine inner experience.
Crucially, for Stanislavski, an actor never stops being themselves. They draw upon their memories and experiences as analogues for the thoughts and actions of characters.
He believed “losing yourself” in a part killed it. It deprived the character of the one genuine soul available to lend it: the actor’s own.
His system was not a fixed doctrine but a decades-long, restless experiment he kept revising – sometimes contradicting earlier positions outright.
Becoming ‘The Method’
Moscow Art Theatre’s 1923 tour of New York found an enthusiastic audience and, with it, some consequential mistranslations. Drafts and lecture notes written years apart were eventually folded into a single English volume, An Actor Prepares, which then got treated as scripture.
When the company went home, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya stayed to teach Stanislavski’s system to American actors. Among their students were Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler.
In 1931, Strasberg, along with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, founded the Group Theatre. This ensemble company became the crucible for what Americans would come to call “the Method”.
Strasberg, in particular, developed what he called “affective memory”: training actors to mine specific, often painful, episodes from their own lives and reliving them on stage to summon the emotion a scene required.
This appears nowhere in Stanislavski’s own writing, which spoke of imagination and given circumstances, not excavation of an actor’s private past.
Method acting, in its most careful sense, refers to this contested set of techniques for building a psychologically truthful performance from an actor’s own memory, sensation and imagination, filtered through Strasberg, Adler and Sanford Meisner at the Group Theatre and, later, the Actors Studio.
Method acting is not staying in character between takes, refusing your own name, or requiring a film set to accommodate your character’s habits.
This is a much later, much more publicity-shaped behaviour – what critic Isaac Butler, in his 2022 history The Method, calls the mythologisation of the actor as tortured genius.
Taylor-Joy folds all of this together: a contested, internally fractured 20th-century tradition and a handful of viral anecdotes about difficult men coalesces into a single, gendered essence.
A Women’s Craft
This broad tradition – drawing on personal experiences and memory to carefully create an honest character, and not relying on rote actions and expressions – provides the basis for how most (if not all) actors work today.
But women who undertake exactly the same kinds of immersive, transformative preparation being described by Taylor-Joy and other mistranslations of the Method aren’t rewarded for it with the same mythology as men.
Hilary Swank trained for three months to box convincingly in Million Dollar Baby (2004). Angela Bassett spent a month training with Tina Turner’s choreographer to play her in What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993). Sissy Spacek insisted on performing every song herself, coached directly by Loretta Lynn, rather than being dubbed for Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980). Portman trained in ballet for a year for Black Swan (2010).
When men do this kind of work, the press calls it commitment, sacrifice, genius – a mystique that becomes part of the marketing. When women do it, it’s called, at best, a great performance – more often, just professionalism.
The disparity is real. It is a disparity in credit: in the way we are led to believe things work, in who gets to be called a genius and who just did the job.
But it is not a disparity in capacity. Collapsing that distinction, ironically, does the same work the industry itself does: it takes women’s labour and renders it invisible, this time in the very act of trying to name the problem.
Associate Professor in Performance Studies, University of Sydney. | This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
