Actress Anya Taylor-Joy recently had thoughts to share on the technique known as method acting, in which performers adopt certain characteristics or personal habits to more intimately understand a person they are portraying.
Specifically, she commented on the ways in which men are free to engage in such a practice – which can involve negatively altering their personalities to heighten authenticity – while women simply are not.
“If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of, so we can’t completely lose our minds,” Taylor-Joy told Complex News during an interview about upcoming projects of hers like the highly anticipated sci-fi sequel “Dune: Part Three.”
She continued, “I see acting as a controlled psychosis in a way. 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.”
But when the immersion gets out of hand, she has people in her life who will guide her back to herself. Those loved ones, she says, will “call me by the character name and they’ll be like ‘we need to check in again.’”
Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Jared Leto, however, are well-known for engaging in method acting throughout a filming process – and have made others around them uncomfortable in doing so. Leto even took to mailing sexually explicit packages to his co-stars in the 2016 anti-hero film “Suicide Squad” as he sought to embody the chaotic, malevolent Joker character.
Day-Lewis defended the technique in a broader sense during a 2025 interview, stating that “it’s just a way of freeing yourself so that … when you are working with your colleagues in front of the camera, you are free to respond in any way.”
Both he and Leto have received critical praise and award recognition for the fruits of these labors. But it’s worth noting that Taylor-Joy has garnered her own impressive set of wins, too – without resorting to such measures.
Beyond whatever positive impacts method acting might have on one’s performance, it’s not often conducive to creating a positive on-set atmosphere – and male actors need to be more mindful of that, Taylor-Joy says.
“I can’t imagine keeping [method acting] 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.”
She added: “If you’re too invested in being an *sshole, then that’s not gonna be very fun.”
