Madness to the method
Hollywood is littered with stories of actors going to extreme lengths for a juicy part. Heath Ledger is just the latest example.
Ledger was remarkably candid about the strain of playing the Joker (a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy,” as he described him) in “The Dark Knight.” “Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he told the New York Times last November. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”
It’s become Hollywood legend that Jack Nicholson “warned” Ledger about playing the Joker. But Nicholson had actually warned him about the sleeping pill, Ambien, that Ledger was using to combat his insomnia: “I warned him to stop,” Nicholson was quoted as saying by the UK’s Mirror. “I tell people about Ambien. Somebody said ‘Take this, it’s mild’. I almost drove off a cliff 50 yards from my house.”
Why is it that some actors delve so far into extreme, edgy characters that it affects their off-screen life? Often dismissed as “method acting” (when actors attempt to tap into real-life emotions), the more extreme of such anecdotes have become popular.
Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for refusing to break character, going so far as to insist on being wheeled around while playing a severely paralyzed character in “My Left Foot.”
Of course, such eccentricities haven’t stopped Day-Lewis from having a long and successful career out of the wheelchair. But when, like Ledger, an actor’s problems continue long after production has stopped, is it the downside of method acting or something else entirely?
“Roles are not the culprit,” says Steven Gaydos, executive editor of Variety. “The idea that a role can destroy a life, like Ronald Coleman in ‘Double Life,’ is a nice story, but it doesn’t have a lot of bearing in reality.” (In “Double Life,” Coleman plays an actor who is driven crazy playing the role of Othello for a prolonged Broadway run.)
Other occupational hazards of working in Hollywood, most often drugs and alcohol, are more likely to blame.
River Phoenix reportedly began experimenting with heroin on the set of “My Own Private Idaho,” in which he played a drug-addicted hustler. He later died of an overdose. But Phoenix had many other issues in his life, including a troubled childhood in the Children of God religious cult. To pin his addiction and death on a taxing role would be an irresponsible oversimplification.
In the end, as Gaydos puts it, “The real danger is real life, not a role.”