Payton Ewalt - Core Post #2

In an interview in 2019, Robert Pattinson said “I always say about people who do method acting, you only ever see people do the method when they’re playing assholes… You never see someone being lovely to everyone while they’re really deep in character.”

The type of method acting Pattinson referenced is the school of thought Konstantin Stanislavsky practiced, where actors should live their characters “as fully as possible” (Dyer 132); basing their performance on inner feelings. In direct contrast with this, Dyer talks about Diderot and Coquelin’s method where they believed that through traditional skills or observation, actors should be able to master a performance without losing themselves in it.

Pattinson’s statement about method brings up the question of what really defines identifiable method acting. Its popularization in the 40s/50s of actors in Elia Kazan’s films led to the more heightened (and sometimes toxic) examples of method acting we associate with actors today like Robert De Niro, Daniel Day Lewis, Christian Bale, etc. Dyer brings in an excerpt talking about Brando’s acting in Streetcar, where we are clearly able to see his method acting because of its brutality and the animalistic traits he displays. How do we identify and actor’s method acting if they’re acting anything but abnormal?

King’s “Articulating Stardom” might help explain some of this, where Dyer's definition of the star drawn upon and use the of the word image is taken a step further to be “restricted to the visual impact of the film ‘system’ on the actor’s ‘personality’ off screen, so that the coherence of the actor’s image on screen is clearly identified as a technologically based construction” (King 177). As an audience, do we need to be able to reference actor’s on and off-screen persona to determine whether they are method acting?

King also brings up stage acting at the beginning of his piece and I had the question of the existence of a hierarchy of acting. Silent era actors thought that acting didn’t need dialogue or sound, and actors in the sound era believed silent actors were simply pantomiming; and acting schools of thought are still divided between Stanislavsky and Diderot/Coquelin. Within film acting alone, there’s so much stress on what acting truly is, but over the years I’ve heard many actors hold stage acting in the utmost esteem; reasons explained by King as one of authorship or intention, and the live aspect of it. This certainly seems the case for British actors, but have you found that King’s statement applies to American theater as well?