Film: Daniel Day Lewis is Lincoln

 

Daniel Day Lewis is soon to be back on our screens in a biopic of Lincoln, and there's a great piece in Time reminding us of his brilliance. His approach of extreme method acting is legend:

... "If lincoln seems given over to legend, so does Day-Lewis’ totalizing methodology of acting, honed over a quarter-century. It comes with its own boilerplate of mythos and anecdote: How he stayed in character throughout My Left Foot (1989), in which he portrayed the profoundly disabled Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, to the point that cast and crew members fed him at lunch breaks and carried him over equipment between setups. How he lived in the manner of an 18th century American Indian in preparation to play the noble warrior Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans (1992), surviving for days on a 3,000-acre (1,200 hectare) expanse of Alabama wilderness. (“If he didn’t shoot it,” Mohicans director Michael Mann says, “he didn’t eat it.”) How he stayed up for three nights straight before a nightmarish interrogation scene as a man wrongly accused of an IRA bombing for In the Name of the Father (1993). How he sharpened knives between takes as the terrifying proto-mobster Bill “The -Butcher” Cutting on the set of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002)."

... (Emily Watson)  I remember asking at the very end, ‘Why do you work like that?’ And he said—it was very sweet—‘Well, I don’t think I’m a good enough actor to be able to not do it this way.’

The comment Lewis makes to Emily Watson underscores why this approach is so important to him - it is required for Lewis to be able to give his best game. If you become the character, you don't need to play the character. Contrast this to other actors who can turn up and play a variety of roles at the drop of a hat without needing to continue living as the character when the red button blinks off. The approach itself doesn't necessarily make an actor better or worse, it's about doing what works best for the individual.