David Davis 44, part 2
the vibes-based school of Method acting
Read Part 1 of my new series on Method acting—what it is, and what it isn’t.
Last time, I wrote about the public misconceptions around the Method in the case of actor Jonathan Majors, who claimed through his lawyers that his “immersive Method acting style” was to blame for his alleged abuse of his coworkers on set. While the controversy surrounding these allegations is certainly an extreme example of how misconceptions of the Method can be leveraged to aid and abet violence1, I’m fascinated by their implications. Who is served by these misconceptions? Why and how do they proliferate?
To be sure, falsely claiming to be Method actor isn’t usually done with cynical ill intent. Still, if we want to be discerning about the Method and who’s doing it2, it’s clear that we can’t always rely on an actor’s (or their legal team’s) self-identification with it.
So, how do we know if someone is really a Method actor? To start, it’s best not to take the headlines for granted. As I wrote about last time, the “immersive” acting style mentioned to by Majors’ lawyers is not the same thing as the Method; nor is any approach to acting just because it is difficult, idiosyncratic, physically demanding, or “perfected” with highly-managed access to stuff like vocal training or bodybuilding. The Method is—or was—a system of rehearsal techniques that was developed by Konstantin Stanislavski and, in America, iterated on by a handful of twentieth-century theatre practitioners3, so why are do many of its contemporary invocations tend to be based on vibes, not facts?
When I read a headline like, “Timothée Chalamet Respects the Austin Butler School of Method Acting,” I go vibe-hunting with such facts as are at my disposal. What, I ask the internet, is Austin Butler’s training or educational history? What is Chalamet’s? Is any identification (whether by Butler himself, or someone else) with the Method based on anything other than, “Getting into character was weird, hard work?” As far as Butler goes, an admittedly perfunctory search doesn’t indicate any deeper engagement with the Method4 than the clickbait that invokes it.
Let’s do this exercise with someone who actually is a Method actor. Take Tom Cruise5, whose charismatic intensity, secretive relationship with the Church of Scientology, and commitment to extreme stunts—for cinema!—make him an easy mark for the vibes-based school of Method acting. But as I outlined above, none of these qualities are enough to earn Cruise the label of Method, or even Method-adjacent, actor. Here’s what does: Cruise, like Joan Fontaine, Anthony Hopkins, and many other big names you’d probably recognize, trained with Sanford Meisner, who like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler developed his own acting technique from Stanislavski’s globally influential system.
Now, we can confirm Cruise’s Method pedigree from scanning Wiki pages, reading articles, and listening to interviews. But the proof is in the pudding, too. The way that Cruise talks about his training as an actor screams Method, even if he never mentions Meisner, Stanislavski, or the M-word itself. Here Cruise is at a presser or film festival (not sure) talking about getting into character for Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004)6.
We spent five months preparing the character in the film. I did training so that I became very competent with the weapon. Trained with live ammo, so that that’s something that I just knew and I could just…I just knew that. And the kind of work that Michael and I did together and the way he works with his actor is working on knowing the history of the character so that we could find those moments and be specific with those moments and discover them when we were shooting.
Cruise’s approach to getting into character for Collateral is certainly immersive—becoming “very competent” with a gun and absorbing the backstory of silver-maned hitman Vincent are both solid techniques to begin “living the part,” as Stanislavski refers to it. But why does “living the part” matter? As Cruise says, “[S]o that we could find those moments…when we were shooting.”
Which is to say: according to the Method, character immersion in service of mimicry is only a point of entry. Truth is not memorized, but discovered. “Plan your role consciously at first, then play it truthfully,” advises Stanislavski’s pedagogical stand-in, Tortsov, in An Actor Prepares. The “assimilation of the model” (the model being, in Cruise’s case, the character Vincent) goes deeper than “sheer imitation, which has nothing to do with creativeness.”
While a sometimes quite impressive skill, imitation is not the goal of good acting; in fact, all of that preparation—the intensive study of the character’s life, background, interests, even their way of moving and speaking—serves a purpose, not of making for better representation, but of creating the right circumstances for inspiration, and therefore creation. “All of this work on your material will help you to permeate it with your own feelings,” explains Tortsov to his acting students. “Without all this you will have no art.”
It bears repeating that Cruise was not a student of Stanislavski, but of Meisner, whose innovation on Stanislavski’s system included a greater focus on the other actors around them (as opposed to one’s own internal thoughts or feelings associated with the character that one is playing). Still, this insistence on the actor being present through the strength of their instincts and imagination, as well of as their preparation—rather than disappearing inside, or beneath, a static character—originates with the master. Cruise speaks to this in a segment from his 2004 visit to the Actor’s Studio:
“You know, I create a character, and it’s all about the story of that character. Creating an umbilical chord from myself to that piece of material…I am who I am, I am constantly looking at life, every day at people. It is my point of view, but from that character. I’m discovering this character and how he feels about things. It’s my instincts, but I don’t personally re-stimulate painful experiences. I’ve found, personally, that it’s made it difficult for me to not be there in the moment for myself. That the availability of emotion is greater for me when I’ve created it. I am the character, and I’m there in the moment, and whatever happens, happens. That’s what works for me: the power of my own imagination.”
Interestingly, this emphasis on presence and imagination aligns with the Stella Adler school of Method acting, which discourages the reliance on affective memory7. But the emphasis on authenticity, whether from Stanislavski or one of his disciples—and “[t]o be an interesting actor, you must be authentic,” claimed Meisner—flies in the face of this phenomenon of the vibes-based Method, a technique colloquially understood to mean the total disappearance of an artist into a role8.
Which brings me, I think, to the heart of this series: if the vibes-based Method can be used to disappear an actor’s agency to the extent that it can be used to disappear literal violence on their part—as is happening with Majors’ abuse allegations—how much can we trust it, or the art it’s said to produce?
ALERT: The person who writes this newsletter is in solidarity with the people of Palestine, and as you are likely aware, the situation in Gaza is growing more dire by the hour. Send me a receipt for a donation of ANY amount to one of the direct support orgs for Palestinians listed in Vicki Osterweil’s most recent newsletter and I will give you 1 free month of access to exclusive DAVID content (blood, bondage, BAD GAY archives, etc.). Thank you 🇵🇸🖤
Find me on Twitter and Instagram. Get my second novel, X, right here. Learn more about the history of this newsletter here.
Not in the least because Majors is a black man, and regardless of whether the allegations against him are true, he will see scrutiny and reprisals that a white man in a parallel situation would not.
Because we’re curious, and nosy, and nerdy.
Sorry, this is starting to feel very, “Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster!”
I could be wrong tho, idk.
I’m a genuine fan of the Last Movie Star, if not an apologist for him. Plus, as is the case for a lot of Millennial children, Cruise’s infamously campy early-aughts behavior with Matt Lauer and Oprah affected me in way that can only be compared with Angelina and Billy Bob, or the release of Cher’s Believe (the single from which I think actually think turned me gay).
Adler famously said, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced—for example, when my mother died—to create a role is sick and schizophrenic. If that is acting, I don’t want to do it.”
It’s not lost on me that, Method or not, rumors, suspicions, and accusations of violence, particularly connected to the cult of which Cruise is, or once was, a high-ranking member, have dogged the actor for years.
If Cruise is to be believed, his development of a character takes more work and commitment than most people are willing to put into their own self-discovery in the service of therapy. This is extremely ironic in the context of his embrace of the fake theraputic practices promulgated by Scientology.