Jennifer Lawrence Says Method Actors Make Her ‘Nervous,’ Prefers Christian Bale’s Technique of Getting Ready ‘10 Seconds to Action’
Jennifer Lawrence sobbed in hot sauce-related pain during an interview on “Hot Ones,” in which she also expressed nerves over working with a Method actor. Lawrence has worked with such acting heavyweights as Leonardo DiCaprio (“Don’t Look Up”) and Christian Bale (“American Hustle”) throughout her career, but no one has gone full Method to the point that Lawrence felt uncomfortable approaching them for a conversation.
“I would be nervous to work with somebody who is Method,” Lawrence said. “I would have no idea how to talk to them. Do I have to be in character? That would make me nervous. I haven’t seen another [acting] process that I’ve been curious about. You don’t know about them all the time.”
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Lawrence said that working with Bale on “American Hustle” changed her acting process as she watched the Oscar winner get in and out of character while filming. According to Lawrence, Bale’s acting process is not to be Method 24/7, but to snap into the character as the camera gets ready to film.
“I had always been very on-off, on-off until I did ‘American Hustle’ and worked with Christian Bale,” Lawrence said. “I noticed when the camera started rolling and the crew started preparing, like 10 seconds to action, he would start getting ready. I saw that and thought, ‘That seems like a really good idea.’ So I started doing that.”
Method acting continues to be a hot button topic in Hollywood. Brian Cox notoriously criticized his “Succession” co-star Jeremy Strong’s Method acting as “fucking annoying” during the press for the HBO series’ final season. Andrew Garfield, who starved himself of food and sex while gearing up to play a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” said last year that Method acting reports have been widely conflated.
“There [have] been a lot of misconceptions about what Method acting is, I think,” Garfield said on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast. “People are still acting in that way, and it’s not about being an asshole to everyone on set. It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”
Garfield added, “I’m kind of bothered by the misconception. I’m kind of bothered by this idea that ‘Method acting is fucking bullshit.’ No, I don’t think you know what Method acting is if you’re calling it bullshit, or you just worked with someone who claims to be a Method actor who isn’t actually acting the method at all. It’s also very private. I don’t want people to see the fucking pipes of my toilet. I don’t want them to see how I’m making the sausage.”
Watch Jennifer Lawrence’s full appearance on “Hot Ones” in the video below.
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