Breaking news to Hollywood’s most annoying method actors: It’s possible to stay in character without “being an asshole,” according to Andrew Garfield.
The “Spider-Man: No Way Home” star is doing his best to change the narrative about method acting, a practice that in recent years has included Jared Leto delaying “Morbius” filming by using fake crutches during pee breaks and “snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce” to prepare for “House of Gucci.”
Garfield recently spoke out in defense of method acting, pushing back against “misconceptions” about the infamous practice, which he said has worked for him.
“It’s not about being an asshole to everyone on set,” Garfield said during an episode of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast released on Monday. “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.”
“I’m kind of bothered by this idea that ‘method acting is fucking bullshit,’” he continued, noting that critics have likely worked with “someone who claims to be a method actor but who actually isn’t acting in the method at all.”
The Oscar nominee said he prefers not to share the “very private” process of creating a character internally.
“I don’t want people to see how I’m making the sausage,” Garfield said. “But it really, really is profound work.”
The actor did, however, touch upon the extreme lengths he took to prepare for his role as a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 historical epic “Silence,” which he found to be a “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,” Garfield recalled, noting the entire process lasted a year. “It was very cool, man. I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food at that time.”
While the process has paid off for Garfield, method acting has drawn some notable critics in recent years among a slew of actors, including David Harbour, Mads Mikkelsen, Sebastian Stan and Jon Bernthal.
Harbour went as far to say that the process is “dangerous,” and “doesn’t produce good work,” while Stan described the approach as an “irresponsible, narcissistic, kind of self-indulgent thing.”
Mikkelsen, meanwhile, simply blasted method acting as “bullshit.”