Anya Taylor-Joy is known for giving full-bodied performances in the likes of “The Witch,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Furiosa” and more, but she’s never gone full Method on a set before nor does she have plans to in the future. The way Taylor-Joy sees it, women do not have the opportunity like men do when it comes to being a Method actor.
“If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of, so we can’t completely lose our minds,” Taylor-Joy recently said in a viral interview with Complex News. “I see acting as a controlled psychosis in a way. You’re pretending to be somebody else and having their thoughts 16 hours a day and moving like them, in their house, in their clothes. It’s like having a sister or a roommate check in up [in my mind] for a little bit.”
Taylor-Joy continued, “I’m just very grateful that the people in my life understand that and know that. Sometimes if it gets out of hand, they’ll call me by the character name and they’ll be like ‘we need to check in again.’ 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 gonna be very fun.”
Kristen Stewart shared a similar viewpoint last December when she told The New York Times that acting is “quite embarrassing and un-masculine” by nature and that going Method is a way for some male actors to temper the “inherently vulnerable” side of being a performer.
“Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine,” Stewart said at the time. “There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?”
Daniel Day-Lewis is perhaps the most well known Method actor if his generation, and he spent much of his 2025 press tour for “Anemone” defending the performance technique.
“All the recent commentary in the last few years about Method acting is invariably from people who have little or no understanding of what it actually involves,” Day-Lewis said at the London Film Festival last year. “It’s almost as if it’s some specious science that we’re involved in, or a cult. But it’s just a way of freeing yourself so that the spontaneity, when you are working with your colleagues in front of the camera, that you are free to respond in any way that you’ll move to in that moment.”
Day-Lewis then stressed to Big Issue that Method acting is simply about “freeing yourself so you present your colleagues with a living, breathing human being they can interact with,” adding: “It’s very simple. So it pisses me off this whole ‘Oh, he went full Method’ thing. What the fuck, you know? Because it’s invariably attached to the idea of some kind of lunacy. 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.”
Watch Taylor-Joy’s full interview with Complex in the video below.
