12 Apr – Jared Leto, Jim Carrey, and Daniel Day-Lewis may have sworn by method acting, but Mads Mikkelsen seems to echo all the people out there by calling it pretentious. The "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore" star, who sat down for an interview with GQ recently, stated that he might be fairly annoying to work with, but at least he is not method. "It's bullshit. Preparation, you can take into insanity," he continued. "What if it's a [bad] film? What do you think you achieved? Am I impressed that you didn't drop character? You should have dropped it from the beginning! How do you prepare for a serial killer? You [are going to] spend two years checking it out?"
He also gave a hypothetical scene, in which he appears alongside a method actor. "I would have the time of my life, just breaking down the character constantly. 'I'm having a cigarette/ This is from 2020, it's not from 1870 - can you live with it?' It's just pretentious. Daniel Day-Lewis is a great actor. But it's got nothing to do with this," he said. Mikkelsen also stated that the hype on method acting is caused by media's interest in it. "The media goes, 'Oh my god, he took it so seriously, therefore he must be fantastic; let's give him an award. Then that's the talk, and everybody knows about it, and it becomes a thing." Developed by Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and further developed by several teachers that include Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, method acting became popular in Hollywood through actors like Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro. However, there have been instances of method actors rubbing others the wrong way, from Jim Carrey channeling comedian Andy Kaufman in "Man on the Moon" by going on drunken tirades and crashing a car, to Jared Leto's infamous sending disturbing gifts to his "Suicide Squad" co-stars to immerse himself in the role of The Joker. Director Daniel Espinosa recently confirmed this about Jared Leto; that the "Morbius" star was so committed and even used the character's crutches and slowly limp to go to the bathroom during breaks to stay in character (it's all part of method acting). However the bathroom breaks took too long that they eventually gave him a wheelchair to speed it up.