Daniel Day-Lewis has expressed frustration at being pulled into a debate over method acting, following comments made by Brian Cox about the technique. The three-time Oscar winner told The Big Issue that he was inadvertently caught up in a “handbags-at-dawn conflict” after working with Cox on the 1997 film The Boxer.
Cox has previously criticised his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong’s immersive approach, which drew comparisons to Day-Lewis’s own reputation for method acting. Day-Lewis, who employed Strong as an assistant on the 2005 film The Ballad of Jack and Rose, said he did not feel responsible for Strong’s methods. “Jeremy Strong is a very fine actor, I don’t know how he goes about things, but I don’t feel responsible in any way for that,” he stated.
Day-Lewis also defended method acting, dismissing the idea that it involves extreme behaviour. “They focus on, ‘Oh, he lived in a jail cell for six months’ [for In the Name of the Father]. Those are the least important details,” he said. “It pisses me off this whole ‘oh, he went full method’ thing. What the fuck, you know? Because it’s invariably attached to the idea of some kind of lunacy.”
The actor, who has returned to the screen in his son Ronan Day-Lewis’s debut film Anemone, clarified that he never intended to retire. “I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while,” he said, referring to his break after 2017’s Phantom Thread as “grandiose gibberish.”
