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One of the most sought-after actors of our time is making a case against method acting. Anya Taylor-Joy, who has portrayed everyone from a chess prodigy (The Queen’s Gambit) to a Regency-era matchmaker (Emma.) to a renegade warrior (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), might put her all into every role—but she’s never losing herself in the process.
Many male actors credit the method-acting process as crucial to their work. Daniel Day-Lewis reportedly had crew members carry him around the My Left Foot (1989) set. Jim Carrey insisted the Man on the Moon (1999) crew call him by his character’s name. Al Pacino even began living life as if he had lost sight while preparing for his role as a blind man in 1992’s Scent of a Woman. More recently, Austin Butler famously adopted a convincing Elvis Presley voice for Bad Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, Elvis—speaking to his family and friends in character during the filming, and for years after.
But for Taylor-Joy, this kind of acting prep has never been an option. In an interview with Complex News, the Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actor explained that, as a woman, she cannot simply slip away into a character for months on end during filming. “If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of,” she said. “So we can’t completely lose our minds.”
“I see acting as a controlled psychosis in a way. You are pretending to be somebody else and having their thoughts 16 hours a day and moving like them, in their house, in their clothes,” she continued, likening the situation to having a “sister or a roommate check in” in her mind “for a little bit.”
“But I can’t imagine keeping it up all the time because, again, you’re going to work with hundreds of people, and it is your responsibility to be good to them and to help them do their best job. If you’re too invested in being an asshole then that’s not going to be very fun.”