Yahoo Lifestyle 17 Actors Who Went Alarmingly Method And Low-Key Crossed A Line
When an actor employs Method acting, they put their entire mental, emotional, and physical self into the role, essentially "becoming" the character. Oftentimes, we hear about Method actors living as their characters, like how Lady Gaga spent a year and a half in character as Patrizia Reggiani for House of Gucci.
Now, to each their own, but sometimes, actors take the controversial practice too far. It's one thing to be annoying about staying in character, but at a certain point, I implore them to consider what Laurence Olivier once told Dennis Hoffman: "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?"
Here are 17 times actors took Method acting too far:
1.In 2016, Jared Leto — who was only in Suicide Squad for ten minutes — told E! that, to prepare for his role as the Joker, he gave his costars some pretty horrific gifts, including "anal beads" and "used condoms." He said, "I did a lot of things to create a dynamic, to create an element of surprise, of spontaneity, and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there. I mean, the Joker is somebody who doesn't really respect things like personal space or boundaries." His costar Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje said, "He sent used condoms and sticky Playboy magazines. I mean, it just weren't right."
He continued, "If you're gonna have that kind of party, at least invite the Croc. You know what I mean? Don't send me your dirty leftovers. That just isn't right. You see why he ain't part of the squad, right?"
Fellow costar Will Smith said, "Jared has gone full Joker...He really set the tone. He wasn't playing with it. He was dead serious as an actor he was going in, and he was 100 percent going into this character. And he really jarred the rest of us into, 'Okay, okay. He's not fooling around, so we need to get it right.'"
Similarly, costar Viola Davis told Vanity Fair, "He did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts. He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room. And the henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table, and then he walked out. And that was our introduction into Jared Leto. Now, I'm terrified just as a person ... But the second part was, 'Oh shit, I've got to have my stuff together.' You talk about commitment. And then he sends Margot Robbie a black rat — it was still alive — in a box. She screamed, and then she kept it." She also told E! that Jared sent her a box of bullets.
She said, "It was a little worrisome. It made you a little bit nervous and I'm pretty tough. You know I got into a few fights when I was growing up...but it scared me a little bit."
However, in 2021, Jared told Entertainment Weekly that he was a "good boy" on set. He said, "Any of the very few gifts that were ever given were given with a spirit of fun and adventure and received with laughter, fun, and adventure. It's all filmed! They filmed it all! People were dying. We were just having a goof...The only gifts I ever gave Margot were cupcakes. I think I gave her a mouse, and some of the other guys got gifts that you'd get as a joke at a party.
...I'm playing a guy called the Joker, it's okay to play some jokes. Nothing ever crossed any lines, and it's not up to other people on the internet to create those lines. I'm an artist at the end of the day. If I do something risky and you don't like it, basically, you can kiss my ass."
2.In 2015, Jamie Dornan admitted to doing something that had him worried he could "get arrested" while prepping to play serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. He told the LA Times, "The first series, I did do a couple of things to try to get inside [his mind]. On the Tube, which is our underground system...Can we get arrested for this? Hold on ... this is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that." He said that he kept distance between himself and the woman, got off at her stop, and followed her for a few blocks. He continued, "It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way. I'm sort of not proud of myself."
"But I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I've obviously never done any of that. It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of 'what are you following her for?' and 'what are you trying to find out?'" he said.
3.Per Us Weekly, in 2014, Aaron Eckhart told The Howard Stern Show that, to prepare for his role as grieving father Howie Corbett in Rabbit Hole, he attending a support group for parents experiencing child loss and pretended to have a child who died. He said, "It's rude. It's very sensitive to go in there, of course it is. I did the research. The gathering is very quiet. There's 10 people, couples. [Their children had died] very recently. It's fresh. You're sitting in sort of a circle. Then one person goes, then two, three, then it gets to me. And by that point, you're just so flushed that you just start going and giving the details of the story."
He continued, "Oh yeah, 100 percent, I lost it. You really believe that you just lost a child. You are as close to reality in that sense as possible. I don't want to be rude to people who have lost a child, but yeah, you feel right there, you feel like your character."
4.In Kramer vs. Kramer, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep played a married couple going through a separation. During their first take of the scene where Joanna tells Ted she's leaving him, Dustin allegedly improvised slapping Meryl in the face. In 2018. Meryl told the New York Times, "This is tricky because when you're an actor, you're in a scene, you have to feel free. I'm sure that I have inadvertently hurt people in physical scenes. But there's a certain amount of forgiveness in that. But this was my first movie, and it was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping. But I think those things are being corrected in this moment."
"And they're not politically corrected; they're fixed. They will be fixed, because people won’t accept it anymore. So that's a good thing," she said.
According to Vanity Fair, off camera, Dustin also taunted Meryl about the recent death of her boyfriend, John Cazale, and his cancer. In 2016, producer Richard Fischoff told the outlet, "He was goading her and provoking her, using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance."
After Dustin slapped and provoked Meryl, director Robert Benton pulled her aside and told her, "There's a speech you give in the courtroom, but I don't think it's a woman's speech. I think it's a man trying to write a woman's speech."
Meryl agreed to rewrite Joanna's speech. Robert forgot about it, but she didn't. However, after a few minor edits, her version made it into the film.
Robert said, "Part of the pleasure she must have taken is showing to Dustin she didn't need to be slapped. She could have delivered anything to anybody at any time."
5.According to costar Matthew Rhys, Bradley Cooper improvised the Burnt scene where his character, chef Adam Jones, attempts to suffocate himself. Per Entertainment Weekly, in 2015, Matthew told Good Day New York, "There was no acting. [What] I was required to do was tear the plastic bag from his face before he killed himself. So there was no acting required on my behalf, it was genuine panic. He's fearless in his improvisation... He had a very tight plastic bag over his head and obviously I don't recommend it." During a press conference, Bradley reportedly said, "It was late at night, and we didn't have much time, and the bag thing just sort of happened in one of the takes."
He continued, "It just feels vulnerable doing something like that in front of 12 people you don't know at all, but ultimately it was beautiful because Matthew Rhys, who plays Reece, was just incredible. We didn't really know each other at all. and next thing you know, he's caressing me and calmed me down. We're bonded forever.
Matter of fact, I haven't really seen him since, and I look forward to seeing him tonight because we looked at each other after, and we, why we both love doing what we do is to be able to really put yourself in imaginary circumstances and hope that accidents like putting an bag on your head and realizing you can kill yourself happen."
6.In 2016, Ben Foster told GQ that, to prepare for the role of General Terry, a veteran experiencing homelessness in Rampart, he slept on the Los Angeles streets "pissing [his] pants like everyone else."
7.In 2015, Ben Foster told the Guardian that, to play Lance Armstrong in The Program, he took performance-enhancing drugs. He said, "I don't want to talk about the names of the drugs I took. Even discussing it feels tricky because it isn't something I'd recommend to fellow actors. These are very serious chemicals, and they affect your body in real ways. For my own investigation, it was important for me privately to understand it. And they work...There's a fallout. Doping affects your mind. It doesn't make you feel high. There are behaviors when you've got those chemicals running through your body that serve you on the bike but which, when you're not...I've only just recovered physically. I'm only now getting my levels back..."
"I don't know how to separate the chemical influence from the psychological attachment I had to the character. If it's working, it keeps you up at night. This is losing your marbles, right? They're definitely rolling around. They're under the couch, but they're retrievable," he said.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, he also told the BBC that the drugs he took were "all legal" and taken in a "contained, doctor-supervised manner," but he "definitely damaged" his health.
He said, "Go faster, go longer, go stronger. That's why you take them. And they took drugs because they work. But they also can damage the body very long-term and in very serious ways. I had a great doctor, which helped me handle some of those consequences. But it took about half a year to get my levels right, and I would say for any athlete, you have to ask, 'Where are your values?'"
8.When Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat, he stays in character while filming amongst unsuspecting people in the real world. While filming the first Borat, he was "thrown out" of New York state. In 2024, he told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, "We're at The Wellington Hotel filming Borat, and Borat thought that when he bought the room for 200 bucks, that he bought everything in the room. So, I started carrying out the bed and the furniture. They called the police, and the arrested the line producer and the first AD. And then it became clear that what had happened was that the head of the precinct — we kept on doing all of this stuff with Borat in the same precinct, you know, on Fifth Avenue, around there — and he was like, 'Okay, I want to arrest Sacha.' He knew it was me. And so I was encouraged to leave the state and left the state then."
9.In 2019, Robert Pattinson told Esquire that, when playing "fucking psychotic" Ephraim Winslow in The Lighthouse, he felt that "because you're playing a mad person, it means you can sort of be mad the whole time. Well, not the whole time, but for like an hour before the scene. You can literally just be sitting on the floor growling and licking up puddles of mud...[I was] basically unconscious the whole time. It was crazy. I spent so much time making myself throw up. Pissing my pants. It's the most revolting thing. I don't know, maybe it's really annoying."
Robert acknowledged that his approach did get annoying, particularly to costar Willem Dafoe. He said, "There's a scene where Willem's kind of sleeping on me, and we're really, really drunk. And I felt like we're completely lost in the scene, and I'm sitting there trying to make myself gag. And Robert [Eggers, the director] told me off because Willem's looking at him going, 'If he throws up on me, I'm leaving the set.' I had absolutely no idea this whole drama was unfolding."
10.To play Steve Jobs in Jobs, Ashton Kutcher followed the Apple founder's "fruitarian" diet after studying his eating habits. In 2019, the actor told Hot Ones, "[I] was told that he drank a lot of carrot juice, and, part of it, he kinda always had, like, an orange color to his skin because he drank this Odwalla carrot juice. And I was like, 'Well, if I'm playing the character, I'll just drink carrot juice so I'll have the orange tint to my skin. So I started just drinking carrot juice, like, non-stop, like, all day long. Two weeks before we went to start shooting, all of a sudden, I, like, had this, like, pain in my back, and through the night, it got worse and worse and worse and worse and worse."
He continued, "And I ended up in the hospital on, like, the maximum dose of Dilaudid because my pancreas was, like, crazy out of whack. Then I'm getting freaked out. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've become Steve Jobs. He died of a pancreas [cancer]. This is, like, the ghost of Steve Jobs. It's, like, taking over my [pancreas].' I'm freaking out, and just turns out, it was, like, the carrot juice that was causing this, like, crazy pancreatitis. So, don't drink too much carrot juice."
However, when Mila Kunis, Ashton's wife, appeared on Hot Ones in 2021, she revealed there was more to the story. She said, "He was so dumb. He...only ate grapes at one point...we ended up in the hospital TWICE. With pancreatitis! So, fact check, yes, it was really dumb!"
11.Tyrese Gibson criticized his Annapolis costar James Franco's approach to his role as Midshipman 4th Class Jake Huard. In 2007, Tyrese told Elle, "James Franco is a Method actor. I respect Method actors, but he never snapped out of character. Whenever we'd have to get in the ring for boxing scenes, and even during practice, the dude was full-on hitting me. I was always like, 'James, lighten up, man. We're just practicing.' He never lightened up."
James denied hitting Tyrese on purpose.
In 2008, he told GQ, "I take full blame for any problems on that film. If he had a bad experience working with me, I was probably a jerk. I was not purposely cruel to him, but I was probably so wrapped up in my performance that I was not as friendly as I could have been. This is such a stupid issue I can't believe I'm still talking about it. But when I'm asked about it in the press it makes it seem as if it's still an issue. I think Tyrese is a sweet guy with a good heart. I wish him all the best."
12.Gary Oldman refused to gain weight for the role of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour out of concern for his health, but, over the course of filming, he smoked at least 400 Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars, which the former Prime Minister had an affinity for. In 2017, Gary told The Hollywood Reporter, "I got serious nicotine poisoning. You'd have a cigar that was three-quarters smoked, and you'd light it up, and then over the course of a couple of takes, it would go down, and then the prop man would replenish me with a new cigar — we were doing that for 10 or 12 takes a scene." Director Joe Wright added, "It's Winston Churchill. You can't have Winston Churchill without a cigar."
13.To prep for the role of Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father, notorious Method actor Daniel Day-Lewis spent two days in a prison cell without anything to eat or drink. In 2008, he told the Guardian, "You have to learn. You need to understand what it is like to be interrogated by three two-man teams over a period of two days. If an innocent man signs a confession, which pisses away his life, it is part of your responsibility to touch on why a human being would do that. So my curiosity leads me into those places. But I don't want to make too much of the details. They are just that — details. When you don't know from experience, or you can't explore through the imagination, you better do some sort of practical work that is at least going to stimulate the imagination, because finally the whole thing is just an act of imagination."
He continued, "It all sounds so ponderous and self-important. It's why I avoid talking about the way I work. But in avoiding it. I seem only to have encouraged people to focus their fantasies about me in an ever more fantastical way on the details that are not at all at the center of the work."
On set, he spent more time in a cell and had the crew throw cold water and shout abuse at him.
14.Per the Guardian, while playing artist Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy, in My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis had crew members push him around in a wheelchair, lift him, and spoonfeed him. Spending so much time in the wheelchair caused damage to two of his ribs. He won his first Oscar for the role.
15.For Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Hugh Glass in The Revenant was physically grueling. After rehearsals, the cast and crew spent nine months filming in freezing Canada and Argentina, "in an all-natural environment, succumbing to whatever nature gave [them]." However, the actor took his performance even further. In 2015, he told Yahoo, "I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. Whether it's going in and out of frozen rivers, or sleeping in animal carcasses, or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly...I certainly don't eat raw bison liver on a regular basis. When you see the movie, you'll see my reaction to it, because Alejandro [G. Iñárritu, the director] kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction."
He also said, "The truth is that I knew what I was getting into. This was a film that had been floating around for quite some time, but nobody was crazy enough to really take this on, simply because of the logistics of where we needed to shoot and the amount of work and rehearsal that would have to be done to achieve Alejandro and [cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's] vision. They're very specific about their shots and what they want to achieve, and that...was something that became more of a profoundly intense chapter of our lives than we ever thought it was going to be."
Leo also acknowledged the hard work and dedication of the crew.
He said, "Look, what we were trying to pull off was so incredibly ambitious, and [Alejandro] is vigilant and incredibly specific about what he wants up on screen, and he won’t accept anything less. So along the way, if we had departments that didn't agree or departments that didn't work correctly with the situation … I wasn't privy to exactly what went on. But to me, most of the people were there working incredibly hard, and they should be given due credit for the effort they gave this movie. Because everyone I saw was giving their heart and soul to pursuing his vision."
16.Per the Guardian, while shooting Rocky IV, Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren "always went for it" in fight scenes. In 2010, Sylvester told FHM Magazine, "I gave him orders to try to knock me out while the cameras were rolling. At one point, he hit me so hard on the top of the head I felt my spine compress. He then hit me with an almighty uppercut. That night, my chest and heart started to swell, and I had to be helicopter-ambulanced from my hotel to a nearby emergency room. I was told that Dolph had punched my rib cage into my chest, compressing my heart. If it had swollen any more, I would have died. After that, I was like, 'Dolph, it's only a movie, bro...'"
17.And finally, Sylvester Stallone once again gave fight scenes his all while playing Barney Ross in The Expendables. He told FHM Magazine, "Man, it was seven guys, kicking each other's ass, one guy tougher than the next…No joke, our stunt guys were begging for mercy. Actually, my fight with Stone Cold Steve Austin was so vicious that I ended up getting a hairline fracture in my neck. I'm not joking. I haven't told anyone this, but I had to have a very serious operation afterwards. I now have a metal plate in my neck."
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
