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Challenging and unorthodox, method acting is the popular method of Hollywood heavyweights looking for to easiest their craft. First developed via Constantin Stanislavski of the Moscow Art Theater, and later tailored through Lee Strasberg for American actors, method acting emphasizes the apply of connecting to a personality through drawing on private emotions and memories. Method acting requires that actors totally immerse themselves within the character, frequently to the extent that they stay “in persona” offstage or off-camera for the duration of a venture. While diversifications of method acting are not unusual in Hollywood, those are 10 of probably the most extreme examples of actors who have taken their craft to the following degree.
10. Mickey Rourke: The Wrestler (2008)
According to critics, Mickey Rourke’s Oscar-nominated turn in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was once an ideal instance of artwork imitating existence. In the film, Rourke performs a run-down wrestler past his top searching for one more shot at the large time.
Mickey Rourke was once a leading guy within the Nineteen Eighties and 1990s, but his profession had fallen on hard instances. If method actors draw upon real emotion and their own skilled highs and lows to gasoline a efficiency, then it’s no stretch to mention that Mickey Rourke was really playing himself in The Wrestler.
9. Hilary Swank: Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
Hilary Swank earned an Academy Award for Best Actress for her position as Brandon Teena in the 1999 biographical indie film Boys Don’t Cry. The significantly acclaimed film advised the story of Brandon Teena, a female-to-male transsexual who used to be raped and murdered in Humboltd, Nebraska.
Swank auditioned for the function anonymously, pretending to be a small town lady from Nebraska, and even though the ruse didn’t remaining long, the transformation was once enough to convince director Kimberley Pierce, who had auditioned hundreds of actresses, that Swank was once the fitting actress for the position. Prior to filming, Swank reportedly lived as Brandon Teena for a month, going out in public and attempting to mix into society.
8. Christian Bale: The Fighter (2010)
The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell, centers on the lifestyles of professional boxer “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his older half-brother Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). While Bale is no stranger to darkish and complex roles, the determination to his craft being exhibited time and time again, he in spite of everything had a character in Dicky Eklund by which his method acting methodology was rewarded.
According to David O. Russel, “Dicky has an entire rhythm to him, a track. Christian had to determine how his mind worked.” In order to organize for the function, Bale took notes on Eklund’s mannerisms and recorded conversations with a purpose to highest his idiosyncratic Boston accent. Given that Dicky Englund used to be a suffering crack addict in the duration the film covers, Bale needed to drop some pounds -this wasn't an issue as the actor had infamously dropped 63 lbs. for a job in Brad Anderson's 2004 movie The Machinist. In the end, Bale's strategies paid off. He gained the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
7. Jim Carrey: Man on the Moon (1999)
Directed by means of Milos Foreman, Man at the Moon is a biographical comedy drama that traces the lifestyles of Andy Kaufman, the eccentric comic and prankster very best known for his appearances on Saturday Night Live, in addition to his function as Latka Gravas in the tv sequence Taxi. Jim Carrey played Kaufman within the 1999 film, and right through the shoot Carrey was reportedly in character both off and on the set.
Carrey not only channeled Andy Kaufman, however he also channeled Kaufman’s modify ego, Tony Clifton. Carrey’s chameleonic performance received him a Golden Globe, but his method acting antics pissed off his pals, family, and coworkers.
6. Heath Ledger: The Dark Knight (2008)
Heath Ledger described his Joker as a “psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with 0 empathy,” and his chaotic interpretation of the comic guide villain earned him a posthumous Oscar (Best Supporting Actor) in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. In order to inhabit the function, Ledger locked himself in a lodge room for a month and experimented with the character’s voice, posture and persona, even going as far as to stay a "Joker" diary through which he recorded the nature’s off-the-wall ideas and emotions. Kim Ledger, Heath’s father, stated his son “preferred to dive into his characters, but this time he truly took it up a notch.”
“Bye-Bye.” Those are the ultimate phrases scrawled in Heath Ledger’s “Joker” diary, and they're as tragic and haunting as they're coincidental. The 28-year outdated Australian actor died from a prescription drug overdose at his SoHo apartment on January 22, 2008.
5. Charlize Theron: Monster (2003)
South African beauty Charlize Theron won't have appeared like the ideal actress to play Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer, prostitute, and broken man-eater who killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990, however movie critic Roger Ebert known as Theron’s efficiency in Monster “one of the greatest in the history of cinema.” Charlize Theron gained 30 lbs. for the function. She masked her face with makeup and wore prosthetic enamel during the shoot.
More importantly, Theron’s performance, with its uncooked emotion and tortured intensity, was transcendent -a vintage textbook example of an actress disappearing into a task. “I believe I’ve attempted most of my profession to turn out to be myself into characters. This used to be simply extra extreme, ” stated Charlize Theron. The transformation into Aileen Wuornos earned Theron the Oscar for Best Actress in 2003.
4. Forest Whitaker: The Last King of Scotland (2006)
Rumor has it Forest Whitaker threw himself so deep into the position of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin within the movie The Last King of Scotland that his spouse and kids refused to talk to him all the way through all the shoot. According to director Kevin Macdonald, “Forest was once at a crisis point in his occupation and felt like this was once a make or wreck position.
For just about six months he wanted to be Amin, not simply carry out him.” Whitaker stayed in personality the entire break day set. He ate simplest mashed bananas and beans. Moreover, Whitaker not most effective mastered Idi Amin’s unique and trickily nuanced accent, however he also realized the best way to speak fluent Swahili and Kakwa. Forest Whitaker gained the Best Actor Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for his performance within the 2006 movie.
3. Robert De Niro: Raging Bull (1980), Cape Fear (1991)
“I started to comprehend what a fats man is going thru,” Robert De Niro mentioned. “You get rashes on your legs. Your legs scrape together.” In 1980, De Niro packed on 60 lbs. to play the washed-up version of boxer Jake La Motta in Martin Scorsese’s biographical sports activities drama Raging Bull. Today, binging and purging for a coveted function is regular practice in Hollywood, but that wasn’t always the case, and De Niro’s physical transformation for Raging Bull has long been the standard-bearer. Robert De Niro took home the Academy Award for Best Actor for his position as Jake La Motta.
In 1991, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese teamed up for a remake of the 1962 movie Cape Fear. For the role of Max Cady, a person out for revenge on the legal professional who purposely misplaced the case against him fourteen years earlier than, De Niro as soon as again underwent an extreme bodily transformation. However, this time the faithful thespian were given menacingly ripped and muscular, decorated his body with jailhouse tattoos, mastered a gradual, convincing southern drawl, and in in all probability one of essentially the most extraneous and misguided examples of method acting, even paid a dentist $5,000 to grind down and warp his teeth.
2. Adrian Brody: The Piano (2002)
Adrien Brody won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his efficiency as Wladyslaw Szpilman in the 2002 Roman Polanski movie The Pianist. At 29, Brody was once the youngest actor ever to win the award. “The good looks of what I do,” says Brody, “is that it will give you the opportunity to give up who you're and try to understand anyone else, once more, different struggles, other feelings.”
To get ready for his function as a real-life concert pianist and Holocaust survivor, Brody engaged in a single of essentially the most detailed periods of method acting insanity. At Polanski’s request, Brody practiced the piano for four hours an afternoon, till he gained the technical proficiency to play specific passages of Chopin. Meanwhile, with the intention to get into the mind-set of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a man who misplaced his circle of relatives and home, however one way or the other controlled to continue to exist the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, Brody gave up his condominium in New York, bought his car, unplugged his telephone, and moved to Europe with nothing however a suitcase and a keyboard. Finally, with the intention to enjoy the emptiness that goes with hunger -Szpilman needed to scavenge for meals in bombed-out Warsaw -Brody went on a crash diet and lost 30 lbs. "It took over half a year after the film was done to settle back into things," mentioned Brody.
1. Daniel Day-Lewis: My Left Foot (1989), The Boxer (1997), and Lincoln (2012)
The method acting preparations that Daniel Day-Lewis has engaged in over his profession are the stuff of legend, and his three Best Actor Academy Awards illustrate that those arrangements, however disciplined or extreme, paid off. Method acting can have been a method developed to encourage actors to make use of personal experiences to spot with their characters, but Daniel Day-Lewis has taken that technique and redefined it, bringing the immersive technique to ever-greater heights.
When getting ready for his Oscar-winning efficiency as Christy Brown, the Irish writer and painter who had cerebral palsy, Daniel Day-Lewis refused to leave his wheelchair even when he wasn’t filming My Left Foot. Supposedly, Day-Lewis suffered two broken ribs from sitting in a hunched position within the wheelchair all over the length of the shoot. In order not to wreck character, it’s additionally reported that Day-Lewis insisted on being spoon fed off set. In preparation for Jim Sheridan’s 1997 movie The Boxer, Daniel Day-Lewis skilled for 18-months with a world-class boxer. The English actor changed into so skilled on the game that the boxing trainer stated he can have competed professionally.
In order to organize for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln biopic, Daniel Day-Lewis reportedly spent a full yr researching and studying in regards to the 16th U.S. president. By the time capturing started, Day-Lewis was so completely in personality that he despatched textual content messages to his coworkers as “The Commander in Chief" or signed them with an “A,” for Abraham. In order to further achieve historical accuracy all discussion of current events was banned on the set. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Lincoln's son in the film, went so far as to suggest that he hadn’t even met the real Day-Lewis until a man in jeans and a t-shirt greeted him at the wrap party.
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