“Method acting is a label I don’t really understand, because there’s method to everyone’s acting.” Dougray Scott.

Daniel Day Lewis swears by it, Liam Neeson abhors it, and without it Heath Ledger’s Joker could have been very different. It’s all very well for Hollywood stars to take little jaunts out of reality for weeks at a time, but how can method acting be practically adapted for regular performers who perhaps need to keep their handle on reality a little tighter to cope with the slew of auditions and casting calls?

Animal Instinct

Perhaps the easiest method acting ploy to whip out of the bag on command during any auditions or casting calls is that of the animal exercise. Choose a wild animal that evokes similarities with your character and personify it in your performance. For example, John Cleese’s character, Archie Leach (A Fish Called Wanda) has some very meerkat-like mannerisms, whereas Jamie Lee-Curtis’ Wanda moves with the sinews of a cat.

Sensational Performance

In life, we don’t visualise an experience and draw from our imagination exactly how it felt or how we responded to it. This is basically the bones of method acting – drawing inspiration and stimulation from real thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences. The simplest sense-based method acting technique is to have a friend accompany you on a shopping trip on which you should be blindfolded the entire time. Recall those feelings of isolation, fear, and so on for many emotional performance situations, e.g. the bleakness after a lover’s death.

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