A very British scandal.
Photo: Getty Images

A fearsome war has begun in the United Kingdom over Method acting, and the opposing armies both have an esteemed British actor — Sir Daniel Day Lewis and OBE recipient Brian Cox — leading the charge. The irascible Cox has spent years prodding Day-Lewis in interviews over his acting techniques, largely as a way of explaining his irritation with Succession co-star (and Day-Lewis’s fellow Method actor) Jeremy Strong. Now, Day-Lewis, who is currently promoting his son’s film Anemone, wants Cox to get off his pulpit. “Listen, I worked with Brian Cox once and got somehow drawn into this handbags-at-dawn conflict inadvertently,” Day-Lewis told The Big Issue in a November 3 interview, referring to their work together on the 1997 film The Boxer. “Brian is a very fine actor who’s done extraordinary work. As a result, he’s been given a soapbox … which he shows no sign of climbing down from. Any time he wants to talk about it, I’m easy to find.”

It tracks that Day-Lewis might take the chance to respond to his former co-star: Cox has described Strong’s acting process as “fucking annoying” and gone on to compare him to Day-Lewis. While the Method, developed by the Russian dramatist Konstantin Stanislavski and brought to America by Lee Strasburg, calls on actors to use real emotion to portray characters’ subconscious, in stereotype, both Cox and the world use it to mean “overserious actor who stays in character for months on end and gets really weird about it.” “To me, Daniel Day-Lewis got worn out at 55 and decided to retire because [he] couldn’t go on doing that every day,” Cox told Seth Meyers on Late Night in 2021. “It’s too consuming, and I do worry about it. But the result — what everyone says about Jeremy — the result is always extraordinary and excellent.” Yes, extraordinary, excellent, and also, per a 2022 Deadline interview with Cox, “exhausting for the rest of us.”

Cox has also theorized that Strong’s use of the technique is because of DDL. “Of course, Jeremy was Dan Day-Lewis’s assistant. So he’s learned all that stuff from Dan,” he told Variety in 2023. But the boss doesn’t see it the same way. “If I thought during our work together I’d interfered with his working process, I’d be appalled. But I don’t think it was like that. So I don’t know where the fuck that came from,” Day-Lewis told The Big Issue. “Jeremy Strong is a very fine actor, I don’t know how he goes about things, but I don’t feel responsible in any way for that.”

And the Method is innocent, too. “I just don’t like it being misrepresented to the extent it has been,” Day-Lewis said. “I can’t think of a single commentator who’s gobbed off about the Method that has any understanding of how it works and the intention behind it.” He added that “I choose to stay and splash around, rather than jump in and out or play practical jokes with whoopee cushions between takes or whatever people think is how you should behave as an actor.” Cox is never one to turn down the opportunity to respond. We await his inevitable return to his soapbox with bated breath.

Related