Method Acting Sickos

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1:24Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restless Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Still in La Belle Italia. Si. That means Italy. Oh, does it? I've always wondered. I pick up a bit of the lingo. Wherever I go, I pick up a bit of the lingo. That's how I work. Like a sponge you are for the culture. like a sponge. As Italians would say, un spugia por la cultura. I think that last bit might actually be correct. Not the sponge bit, obviously. I shouldn't have thought so. Shall we get straight on and ask our first question? Please do. This is from Lucia Gifford.

2:03Oh, Italian. Italian who married an Englishman and is now resentfully living somewhere in England just going, the food is so terrible and the weather. I'm watching a Daniel Day-Lewis movie and I realise I have a burning question for you. How does it work on a movie set when the star is a method actor? There must be so many moments that are strikingly awkward, like hair and make-up. How far does it all go? And are staff on set briefed to play along? The whole story of method acting is so interesting. And let's do a primer on method acting first, and then we'll go on to some of the most egregious examples of it on sets.

2:37It comes actually from Stanislavski, who was a sort of late 19th century Russian actor. And he was really against all the sort of hammy acting they had at the time. And he developed something called the system, which was a sort of more realistic form of acting. And basically that was taken up by a guy called Lee Strasberg in America, who's an actor, but primarily an acting teacher. And in the 30s, he coined the term the method as a way of describing this sort of sort of living the role and really immersing yourself deeply so that you could kind of facilitate realistic behavior under imaginary circumstances, as it were.

3:13you had to do what's called a sort of effective memory exercise. And Lee Strasberg got really into making actors access their past trauma or dark moments. And it sort of at that point stopped being the American version of Stanislavski and became whatever Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula and their disciples wanted it to be. A lot of actors who were kind of credited with being method actors, people like Marlon Brando, really hated it at that point and kind of got out of the actor's studio and severed ties. Al Pacino. Very interesting, actually, if you watch The Godfather Part II, the guy who plays Hyman Roth is Lee Strasberg.

3:49And you have these famous stories of a marathon man, Dustin Hoffman completely immersing himself in the role and Laurence Olivier saying to him, well, try acting, dear boy. So the sort of clash of styles. I mean, I actually think that Lee Strasberg and his wife were bad hats, particularly because of what happened with Marilyn Monroe. Now, Marilyn Monroe, he said, I made Marilyn Monroe an actress even though she was a star when she came to him. I mean, they really sort of took her over completely, him and his wife Paula. People said to Marilyn Monroe, you know, why are you putting all this poison into yourself?

4:19Why are you allowing yourself to become like this? But she left them everything in her will. No, really? Lisa Fresberg? Really? Yeah. I mean, Paula used to cough during the takes when she felt she wasn't doing it in the way that Paula would like. She was a nightmare for directors. Really, really difficult. By the way, this has filtered down into drama schools. You know, it's a form of sort of really dark, unlicensed psychotherapy. I went to university and I didn't have this experience but a lot of my friends went to drama schools and even performing arts schools in sixth form and things like that all of them had been through incredibly dark experiences I remember thinking this is abuse and the things that you've been through and so many people and as far as I know it's never really properly been investigated If you want to make someone as vulnerable as possible then possibly that is helpful if you are an actor but it's more helpful if you're the sort of person who likes people to be vulnerable in your presence Let us lighten this up in a way now, because we've got to talk about Lucia's question, which is how bad does it get on set?

5:14Really, really bad, Lucia. The crew do not like you if you do this, can I just say. Your co-stars often don't like... I mean, you still see those kind of clashes today, you know, that kind of Olivier-Dustin Hoffman clash, I think was really replicated on succession with sort of Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong. I mean, just go and read their interviews and you can just see the absolute sort of... Well, particularly, I think Brian Cox's sort of thinly disguised contempt for that particular way of working. There's an interesting thing that Natalie Portman said, which I rather love, talking about method acting.

5:48I think it's a luxury that women can't afford. I don't think children or partners would be very understanding of making them call me Jackie Kennedy all day. Robert Pattinson as well, I loved it. He said, he said, he says, so interesting. He said, people only ever do method acting when the character they're playing is horrible. He said, no one, when they're playing someone who's really lovely, just goes around set being delightful to everyone 24 hours a day. It's such an excuse to behave in an outlandish or unpleasant way. There's some very strong examples of people who behave very badly on set, right?

6:17Oh, my God. Okay, Jared Leto in Morbius. He refused to get out of character as the disabled title character in Morbius. I mean, this stuff is politically, I find, very complex. And we're going to mention Daniel Day-Lewis on this front as well. So his bathroom breaks would take over 45 minutes as he sort of hobbled across the set. And the director sort of did a deal with him saying, you've got to use a wheelchair because we're wasting the entire day. Now, Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, he's one of the most notorious. Now, he put the entire crew through that particular misery. He played a writer with cerebral palsy and he forced assistants to carry him around on set, feed him with a spoon.

7:00As I say, I think politically this would be a slightly more complicated way to behave in this day and age. When he was playing Lincoln, he made the whole cast speak with American accents so they wouldn't throw him off. I don't think Steven Spielberg loved it. Jared Leto again, playing the Joker in Suicide Squad. And he sent really gross gifts to all the female co-stars. some of his gifts included a used condom, anal beads, a live rat, a pig's head, which he dropped in the middle of the rehearsal room. Again, Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. Now, people hate it. Now, he was on the Andy Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon, and he was pretty difficult.

7:41Obviously, the teacher, the character is a difficult man at the best of times. Jim Carrey claimed he was possessed by Andy Kaufman for four months, got into physical fights with the crew. and he would say things like, why am I here? Why are all these cameras around? Because, you know, he was the guy. If you ever look at a video on Facebook or something, you are then shown a million videos that are the same and I was watching a Norm MacDonald video and now every day I get like 50 Norm MacDonald clips and I'm very, very happy about it. But there's a brilliant one with Norm MacDonald where he's on a chat show with Jim Carrey and they're talking about Man on the Moon and Jim Carrey goes, Norm, do you remember one day you came down to the set of Man on the Moon and Norm goes, I came down to the set of Man on the Moon.

8:24He goes, do you remember when you came down to the set, you came down to visit me on the set of Man on the Moon? And Norm O'Donnell goes, Jim, I was in Man on the Moon. That's why I was on the set. On the chat show that happens? Yeah. Oh, my God. OK, I mean, Jim Carrey did later say that his attitude was self-aggrandising, selfish and narcissistic. So you could only imagine how much worse than all the three of those things it actually was if he's coughed to that. I think it does make it completely insufferable for anyone around you. And, you know, I really think you should be able to do it without it.

8:55You know, some people get incredible results and you can't deny that there are how many incredible Daniel Day-Lewis performances out there. Yeah, there is a halfway house, which is an awful lot of actors will take themselves off for, you know, 20 minutes before a scene, particularly a very emotional scene. No, they have to go somewhere. They do have to find something within themselves. But you can do that without being that person 24 hours a day. Now, we have had about one billion questions about Race Across the World, which is phenomenal this season and all seasons, but this one is so good. Here's one for you, Richard.

9:28How did the team behind Race Across the World find a couple like Yin and Gaz? They are literally the perfect pair for television in terms of their relationship with each other and so sweet. Is it luck or does a casting agent go out of their way to find a team like that? I spoke to their brilliant team on that show. No, there's no casting agent, especially. I mean, there are people on the production team who are incredibly experienced in casting. Obviously, they get thousands of applications. People send in videos. People will trawl through those and, you know, look for people with interesting stories.

9:59Interesting relationships is the main thing on something like Race Across the World. They will invite a number of those people to London. Now, you have to be available for the dates. So you'll be told exactly what the dates are. And, you know, your availability will be checked before you come down to London. They'll look at the interaction between the two people. They'll get back stories. That's one of the beautiful things about that show is how slowly they reveal people's relationships and stories and things that have happened in their life. But they're looking at the interaction. They're looking at the two people.

10:29But then they say to everyone, here's a director. A director walks into the room and they will give them a location in London, which is around about 45 minutes or an hour from the production offices of Studio Lambert. And they will say, we need you to get to that location in the next hour. you're being followed, your time starts now. And so you then take that pair, they then go out on the road, so you see them under pressure, you see how they problem solve, you see how they talk to each other when things are not going right, where things are not going wrong, you see how, you know, they work out what transport to take.

11:00And just things like that, you see them in their natural environment, you see how they are in front of a camera, you see how they are with each other in front of a camera. It's the perfect way of choosing a cast, really. It's incredible deep casting, really, isn't it? It's really, I mean, for producers to cast, that is sort of really immersive. I think that's a very amazing way to do it. It is just brilliant. And it is the thing that makes the show because it's just, you know, beautiful things are happening, beautiful places people are going. But we follow the stories. We follow the emotions. And like any book, like any TV series, characters is the stuff we're interested in.

11:34They need to find people who are going to endure across the series and they need to see people's problem-solving experience. But it's one of the hallmarks of so many of their shows. Also Traitors, also Gogglebox, that sort of deep, deep casting. You're not just picking the first sort of really pretty good or great people who come along to have probed so deeply before you go anywhere close to air. It's really interesting, I think. And it's different. You know, a lot of reality casting is who are the most extreme characters. And certainly 15 years ago, it was, God, who's going to be noisy? Who's, you know, who's crazy?

12:08which we still have on some of the dating shows and things like that and some of the Married at First Sight type shows but a show like this which is mainstream and heartland and you want to watch with your whole family it's a very different sort of casting which is still waters run deep it's not just who's the noisiest it's where are the stories where's the heart and where are the relationships and it's so much better for it it's so much better for it the depth of it is really It's what gives all of those programmes their real depth, is the quality of the people that you're seeing and their stories.

12:42Shall we go for a little break? Let's go for a break.

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14:27Welcome back, everybody. Marina, I have a question for you from Simon Meadows. Simon says, when digital radio is introduced, the first thing everyone noticed was that it always lags behind the analogue signal. I've also noticed time and differences between digital devices. Given this, how can we rely on the accuracy of the Greenwich Pips broadcast on Radio 4? Oh, the short answer to this. We spoke to Matt Gray, who's a broadcast engineer, and said essentially you can't trust them anymore because nothing is true anymore. Like Gladys Knight, when money started disappearing from their dressing room, you cannot trust the pips.

15:03With all... OK, I have to have a pause after that. Marvellous. OK, with old sort of AM and FM radios, the converting the radio waves into sound happened instantly, which meant that all the radios were in sync with each other. But digital radio, the signal processing inside the radio is much more complicated. And so in older digital radios used to take three seconds, but now the technology has improved. They all take different times. Basically, there isn't one magic number for the decoding delay anymore. So in a way, I think they're 101 years old, the pips. They've been going that long. And they were invented by the BBC's first director general, John Reith.

15:41You might have heard of him. Thank you, John. And he did it with the Astronomer Royal, who was Sir Frank Watson Dyson. And so, yes. Wow. That's a hell of a lunch they must have had. Yeah. It's sort of amazing. The machine that used to generate them down the years, you can see these pictures of these different things that used to generate the pips, the Greenwich Time Service, all these things. It's now still an atomic clock in the basement of Broadcasting House. Absolutely not the worst thing that's been in the basement of Broadcasting House. Or maybe still lurks there in various sealed sections.

16:09Yeah, yeah. The various BBC Minotaurs. But yes, they had the short pips and the long ones, still have it on local radio. So people are sort of saying, well, why do we still have them at all? It's one of those things that if you were to get rid of them, even though they don't sort of mean the same thing anymore, there would be an absolute outcry. Finland has them, by the way. Finland has a version of them. Ireland have them. But it's one of those things that if you try to get rid of them, even though people know they don't mean anything anymore in the same way as they used to, people would not be able to stand it.

16:39presenters always talk about the pips on Radio 4. If you crash the pips, if you kind of slightly talk over them, then it's really mortifying. It's one of the great sort of Radio 4 sins. Again, you know, there are some worse Radio 4 sins, I'm sure. But if you sort of kiss the pips, if you can just come just up to them, then that's the real skill. Which, of course, is when Gladys Knight discovered that it wasn't one of her backing band who stole the money, she kissed the pips. Had to make it up to them somehow. And that's a joke from 1973, isn't it? Yeah. I've never really thought about the Pips.

17:09Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? I just assumed they were a naturally occurring phenomenon. But they were invented by someone. Yes, the Royal Astronomer General and the Director General of the BBC. They must have had better things to do, surely. But, yeah, maybe not. I'm going to move us on before we get into some hot water. OK, for reasons that will become clear, I'm not quite sure how I should say this, but Ray Cahill. I have always been Ray Carhill, says Ray Cahill, but 20 years ago my life was ruined by a certain Australian footballer and now everyone calls me Ray Cahill. I'm so sorry, Ray Cahill.

17:44I was going to write him a letter, but I realised it's probably the fall of pundits and commentators up and down the country. Do Guy Mowbray and Peter Drury just decide how they're going to say someone's name or is there an official database in which every Premier League player's name is spelt phonetically? This is a great question. Thank you, Ray, if that's how you pronounce that. I was so glad to see this question because it allows me to draw people's attention to something, which I shall mention at the end of this. But yeah, the basic principle is we didn't really used to have to worry about pronunciation of names, but now we're such a multinational league.

18:15You know, like for years and years, everyone called him Jose Mourinho and he's Jose Mourinho because he's Portuguese and he used to get angry that people would mispronounce his name. And David Ginola, Spurs would constantly be ringing up the broadcaster saying it's Ginola, it's Ginola. So for a long time, pronunciations have been very difficult, Especially, you know, new players being brought in all the time. And so what Sky do now, and you can actually see this, there is a video, there is a super cut of this, they get every single Premier League footballer, I think it was 572 last season, to stand in front of a green screen, in front of a camera, and say their own name.

18:53Oh my God, that's amazing. They each say it twice, and it's brilliant. And then, you know, it'll all be like, you know, you've even got Ben White just going, Ben White. Just say it one more time, Ben. Ben White. It's obviously been given to each of the clubs to do it. You should watch the video. You can see it on YouTube. It's like an hour and a half. It goes on forever. It's like mesmerising. You can tell the press officer each club because they've been told, make sure you say it twice and make sure you say it slowly. I can't remember which club it is. I don't think it's Chelsea. But it's one of the teams where the press officer is really, he gets them to do every single syllable.

19:27He goes, no, I think what they really want you to do is say, Abdullay de Kouray and the person just repeats it. But yeah, it's essentially 572 people telling you how they pronounce their names. This is funny to say Ben White, Ben White, but this is sent around the world. So this is sent to all the foreign broadcasters where actually Ben White is a much harder name to pronounce than some of the foreign names in the Premier League. But it's really, really, just put in Premier League footballers pronunciation, it'll come up and you've got an hour and a half. I don't want to say entertainment, because it's not, but it's a fairly extraordinary achievement.

20:04And you certainly get a sense of the personalities of some of the players. I'm dying for this. A 10-minute interview doesn't tell you much about someone, but literally seeing someone twice having just to pronounce their name and just looking off camera to make sure they've done it right, it just gives a unique insight into that. Because I feel Jagielka, I think right at the end of his career, he just said, you know, you've been pronouncing my name wrong my whole career, you know, I'm Jagielka. and it's just these things you know players just put up with their names pronounced incorrectly forever and ever and ever and which is the same problem there with poor Ray Carhill.

20:41I really love that and I'm dying to see that particular video. A question for you Marina I think I can probably contribute to this one James Allen says I've always said there should be a reality tv show based on my former workplace in a bingo hall regardless this has led me to wonder how a brand new TV programme gets the green light? First of all, you can always, if you've got an idea, you could try and take it to a production company. People are often saying this. And I have to say that one of the things you hear most is, I've got a brilliant idea for a TV show, or I know somewhere where you could film.

21:13The thing I would say is the sort of overarching reply to this about television and the people who make television is that ideas themselves are almost worthless. And people think they've had a genius idea and without wishing to denigrate or great idea about the bingo hall. I'm sure it would be brilliant in the right hands. But the hard work of any of these things, I could sort of come up with 10 places that it would be great to set a documentary. Right now, we both could. It doesn't matter. Anyone can do that to some extent. The hard work is in developing these shows, in testing them, in casting them, in directing them, in cutting them, all of those things.

21:46Those take so long. And if you've got your eye in, you can walk down the high street and see 10 different venues that would be brilliant to shoot a documentary. And, you know, if you had the best people who, you know, we talked about casting earlier, the ways you can cast it, the ways you can develop it, the way you can change it, edit it, all of these things. But there's a sort of conception about television that it is drowning in money, that for having a kind of quick idea, you should be certainly, you know, not just like thanked in the credits, but you should get an executive producer credit and you should get a sort of huge amount of money just for having had the idea.

22:18It's funny, even though we know that TV's in trouble in lots of different ways, people still feel that the mere having come up with that idea, that they've come up with the format. Whereas, as you and I know, and you particularly know, Richard, my goodness, developing a format is a huge amount of work for a huge number of people. Yeah, to James' basic point, if you say, I want to do a reality show in a bingo hall, a million people have said, let's do a reality show in X, let's do a reality show in Y. That is not the end of the process, very much the start of the process, which is which bingo hall why are we choosing that bingo hall is there this amazing character that we've seen is the bigger hall about to close down and therefore there's some jeopardy towards the end of it who are the punters who go to that hall you know where do they live what do they do are there two friends who've been going to that same bingo hall for 60 years and we follow their friendship you know it very quickly becomes not it's just set in a bingo hall yes but what is the show what what do we care about what what are we looking for so so what that is is just a precinct you know setting something in a bingo hall and as you say you could set something anywhere behind the scenes of the shopping center an airport you know it's not a a format however james to your point if a production company had a researcher he went to the same bingo hall every week and said there's three amazing characters here at this bingo hall and there's something about this bingo hall because it's not one of the big chains actually it's independently run by a family they've been running it for 50 years and that family are incredible and they're trying to crowdfund to save this bingo hall you would then shoot a taster tape for that you would talk to all of those people you would go to a broadcaster so you wouldn't say i've got a really good idea let's do something in a bingo hall you'd say i've got an amazing story i've got these amazing characters and i've got a beginning middle and end to this story which is they are trying to save their bingo hall as someone who doesn't work in television if you have stumbled across a particular bingo hall with a particular group of characters who you can shoot on the phone and do a very quick, very cheap edit and send off to people, then people are going to be interested in that.