Why is it considered so good and can any actor master it or does it require special skills?
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Answer: Method acting proposes the embrace of the character and its circumstances. In that way, acting comes not from memory (script) but from what it is experienced while exposing themselves to key circumstances. Those are curated as they seem fit and often it symbolizes a sacrifice of their way of life. Like living like someone else during long periods or exposing themselves to hard jobs or limiting their bodies (sometimes even harming themselves) to act through the real condition their character live with. That sacrifice is considered virtuous as a sign of profound dedication to their craft.
Pretty much living as your character during the entire production. Even when the director yells “CUT”, the actors stays in character. It takes dedication and time and the willingness to be off putting to people depending on the character.
It’s a style of acting popularized in the mid-20th century by Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, who placed special emphasis on having the actors give a more realistic performance based on emotional experience. The idea was that instead of big over the top performances, which had been traditionally the style in most theater traditions, that actors would try to make a more believable performance by using their own experiences to motivate themselves.
If you are performing a play where your character is sad, rather than wailing and making a large exaggerated performance of being sad, you might think deeply about a time that you lost a loved one, and use those memories of real emotions to guide your performance.
The phrase “what’s my motivation?” Was associated with this movement, the idea that an actor should not just be taking actions because that’s what the script says, but that they should have an internal sense of why their character is doing these actions, understanding the motivation behind why their character is making a speech or striking an intruder, or screaming at a wall.
Prior to Stanislavski, there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on trying to make acting feel natural. You wanted to be big and over the top so that people who were far away could still follow the action. But Stanislavski was directing plays written by Anton Chekhov which were more nuanced and less bombastic. He helped pioneer a movement that tried to make acting seem less artificial.
However, in pop culture, many people use method acting to refer to people who take that concept to the next level. Where in order to get the emotional experience of that performance, they basically try to experience what that character would experience as much as possible. You hear stories of the actors who might starve themselves to play a famine victim, or who will spend the night sleeping outdoors to prepare to play a homeless character. Instead of taking similar emotional experiences to motivate themselves, they are trying to reach the next step in a realistic performance.
So when most people talk about method acting, they’re talking about those sorts of actors who are taking the concept of realistic acting to extremes.
weirdly both sides of this argument have legitimacy — Olivier famously berated Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man (Hoffman being a method actor) who slapped himself and hyperventilated for a violent scene, by shouting “why don’t you just act, man!?” Personally, I have lost a shitload of respect for method actors vs those who are “craft” actors — if I have to live in a Tibetan monastery for 3 years to portray a Tibetan monk on film, I’m not an actor, I’m now a Tibetan monk
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