Daniel Day-Lewis and the madness to his acting methods

Oscar winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, renowned for his personal version of “method acting,” decided he needed to stay in character for his role as psychotic Daniel Plainview for the movie, There Will Be Blood. With his family in tow for the shooting of the movie, things got strange when he came home for work.  His wife Rebecca Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and their two children had to live with “Plainview” for quite a while. Daniel said:

“For ‘There Will Be Blood’, my wife and kids were with me throughout. And they did go a little bit crazy living with Plainview all the time, but the kids thought it was a laugh in the end to have this different bloke as their dad and both did a pretty decent impersonation of me.

“My wife is amazingly tolerant. I knew that from the word go. She just believes, like I do, that if you are attempting anything of a creative nature, no rules apply.”

Daniel, also found it hard to come out of character after the film was finished.

He told Film & Cinema:

“Well, absurd as it might seem, when you’ve been someone else for that amount of time, it’s even more absurd when it’s all over. “Then the joke is on all of us, because once a curiosity is unleashed you can’t just tie it up again. It does take time to let go. There is no great part of you that wants to stop doing that work, and no matter how much you’re begging for it to stop you need someone to put a restraining order on it.”

This is actually pretty mild stuff for Daniel.  His preparation, is now notorious, for previous roles.  He crudely tattooed his hands and trained as a real fighter, twice a day, seven days a week, for nearly three years, for The Boxer (1997). His trainer at the time, former world champion Barry McGuigan, remarked that he could have turned professional.

For In The Name of the Father (1993), he slept in an abandoned jail and ate only prison rations. For The Crucible (1996), he lived in the film set’s replica village without electricity or running water and built his character’s house with 17th-century tools.  For Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Day-Lewis prepared for the role of James Fenimore Cooper’s 18th-century hero Hawkeye by living off the land for six months, learning how to hunt, fish and skin animals.

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