Anya Taylor-Joy’s Tasteful Takedown Of Male Method Actors, For Your Viewing Pleasure

Sometimes we all need a little Anya Taylor-Joy roasting the hell out of method actors to kick-start our day, and I say roast, but when you’re as charming and velvet-voiced as Taylor-Joy, even calling out asshole actors comes off like a soothing guided meditation. So now I am meditating to this classy and respectable shade towards a behavior that, yes, plenty of top-of-the-callsheet dudes are known to flaunt—and yes, is ridiculous.

“If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of,” Taylor-Joy said in an interview with Complex News, “So we can’t completely lose our minds.” This is coming from the woman who, on command, manifested a nosebleed while filming a scene for Emma. And she didn’t have to pretend to be someone else for a year or torture her coworkers on set to accomplish it. She is just that powerful, energetically speaking. (Notable actors known to go “full method” for their roles include Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Strong, and pretty much anyone who has ever played the Joker.)

“I see acting as a controlled psychosis in a way,” she continued, “You’re pretending to be somebody else and having their thoughts 16 hours a day and moving like them, in their house, in their clothes.” She added that when she does become too lost in a character, she has to check in with herself: “I’m just very grateful that the people in my life understand that and know that. Sometimes if it gets out of hand, they’ll call me by the character name, and they’ll be like ‘We need to check in again.”

“But I can’t imagine keeping it up all the time because, again, you’re going to work with hundreds of people and it is your responsibility to be good to them and to help them do their best job. If you’re too invested in being an asshole, then that’s not gonna be very fun.” Yep. It’s pretty much that age-old adage of, when a woman does it, she’s difficult to work with, and when a man does it, he wins three Oscars.

Kristen Stewart also said it best in her December interview with the New York Times, when she theorized (some) male actors go use method acting as a way to exert control over what she calls the “inherently submissive” part of acting: “Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine,” Stewart said. “There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?” Nor have I heard of any female actor defend method acting the way male actors do. 

Anyways, let’s stop pretending method acting is a cool thing to subject everyone else to. Don’t get me wrong, Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the best, but let’s not act like method acting requires immense talent when, really, it just requires immense privilege.

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