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Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)
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An interview with Justin Owen Rawlins
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Justin Owen Rollins
Trying to find something real in all.
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Pete Kunze
The noise you always do.
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Justin Owen Rollins
Let's burn this place down.
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Podcast Host (Announcer)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Pete Kunze
Welcome to New Books and Film, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Justin Owen Rollins, assistant Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of Imagining the Reception, Identity and American Screen Performance. The book was published by the University of Texas Press in 2024. Hi Justin. Welcome to the podcast.
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Justin Owen Rollins
Hey Pete. Thank you for having me.
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Pete Kunze
The pleasure is mine. To begin with, can you tell us a bit about your background and training?
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Justin Owen Rollins
Sure. So I have a combined PhD in communication and Culture and American Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. So my training is it was primarily in the cultural histories of North American media, media culture, reception studies, that kind of thing.
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Pete Kunze
Great. And so I imagine, if I'm correct, that this project came out of your dissertation.
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Justin Owen Rollins
It did, it did. I don't know how this Experience was for you, but for me it's a very particular process of, I wouldn't call it quite adaptation. Right. But the dissertation certainly inform the book. Yeah.
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Pete Kunze
So can you tell us a little bit more about that process of revision, expansion, deletion, burning? I know a lot of our listeners are early career scholars, so. And yeah, as you mentioned, I myself just published my, my book out of my dis. And it was a major facelift. So I'd love to hear about how you dealt with the slings and arrows of your own book writing.
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Podcast Host (Announcer)
Yeah.
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Justin Owen Rollins
And I'll preface this by saying I think there are a number of different schools of thought for the relationship between a dissertation and a book. Right. There seems to be a cottage industry of books about making a book out of a dissertation. For me, there were a couple of different strands of thinking. There was a number of pragmatic considerations. My dissertation was very long, much longer than I thought a book should be. And so I needed to think about where it made sense to streamline the argument. I don't know if this was your experience in your dissertation, but in going back over my dissertation after I finished, I found that it was a bit overly repetitive at times. So thinking about how to make a more effective and efficient argument, and I think there were also just, you know, there's just the natural evolution of the project as you continue to read and think about it. And then there's the more esoteric consideration which is, you know, who is this book speaking to? It's no longer committee, it's now a much broader audience and a much broader world. And what is my voice as a writer? So for me, what that looked like was, you know, slimming the, the project way down and then kind of rebuilding it and reorganizing it historically, adding a few different chapters and condensing. Some of the prehistory of method was much, much larger in the dissertation. And here it went From I think 60,000 words down to about 12,000 words. And so really thinking about what's the narrative thread I want here? Who am I speaking to? What's my voice? How do I make this make sense for a larger readership?
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Pete Kunze
Great. So the question I have next for you is kind of a broad one. And that's just what drew you to the method. Why the method as your object of study?
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Justin Owen Rollins
Yeah, that's a great question, in part because I think working on the method is a double edged sword. On the one hand, method acting has absorbed so much of the oxygen in conversations about stage and screen performance. For the last 70 years that there's been a lot of ink spilled, a lot of. A lot of arguments in print and online about what method acting is, what it isn't, people going to method, and so on and so forth. And I. You know, I came to this in a kind of funny way in that I was working on a project for a seminar, and it was about this really terrible John Wayne movie where he plays Genghis Khan. And one of the strangest things I kept coming across in the reception discourse was people saying Marlon Brando would have been much better in this role than John Wayne. And so, aside from. Or in addition to the kind of obvious history of white actors doing yellowface performance, I thought, well, what are the assumptions here about these people as performers? And so I dug a little bit deeper and deeper, and I just came across this fascinating body of reception material about how people made sense of Marlon Brando. And I knew enough about the kind of tenets of method acting at the time to know that the way people were talking about Brando's acting as method had very little relation to actual method tenants. And so that's where the project started. And the more I dug and the more I looked across different historical eras, the more of that I found. And to. To the extent that it's. It's become an entrenched way of thinking about and talking about screen acting, and it's kind of evolved beyond even needing to mention the word method oftentimes, which I think is really fascinating. And that's where in the book, I talk about this concept of methodness. I needed to think of some way of talking about this received idea of method acting and actors that bore some connection, some historical connections to actual method acting, but in many ways has transcended the philosophies and techniques that are, you know, technically associated with method acting.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, that really resonates with me. I remember years ago when I was a graduate student talking with a crusty senior scholar media historian at scms, and they just said over a glass of wine, well, you know, all history projects are really the same. You're basically just arguing, it's been happening for longer than you realize, and it's more complicated than you realize. Which, at the time, I rolled my eyes, and then I went and wrote my own media history. And I'm like, I ended up arguing the exact same thing, right? That. Yeah, it's been happening longer, and it's more complicated than you realize. And I feel like every sentence I wrote could have been like, well, actually, when you look closer And I feel like, I feel like there's a lot of corrective in your work as well when you agree that it's like, you know, the way that we use, you know, for you, the method, for me, the Disney Renaissance, the way we use these terms in popular discourse actually don't hold up upon historical analysis. Right? So. But we'll dig into that more today, right?
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Justin Owen Rollins
So. Yeah, exactly. And, and I think it, you know, one of the things that, that I think you and I both wrestle with, I know I certainly wrestle with in this book, is that, you know, I am one person trying to talk about this concept that has really gripped popular culture in the US for, you know, more than half a century. And so how do I contribute to that discourse without kind of falling into some of the historical traps that have, that have bedeviled a lot of really smart people doing really important work? And I think that's one of the great challenges of talking about method acting is trying to carve out your analysis in a very noisy room with people who are, in terms of kind of popular discourse communities, not scholarly discourse communities, those popular outlets where they are, you know, rehashing kind of old, old worn out and incorrect understandings of, of method acting. I mean, the Jeremy Strong example is a very obvious one, right? Where, you know, a small group of, of us film nerds and acting nerds can, can crow about this on Twitter, right? To our collective following of, of, you know, 5,000 people. But variety magazine only needs to, you know, rehash some kind of reductive summary of the New Yorker profile and that's immediately consumed by, you know, 200,000 people or something, right? So I'm very cognizant of the fact that they're, when working on reception, I am one very small node in a much larger matrix of this broader interpretive landscape that we all reside on.
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Pete Kunze
And that sets up my next question nicely, which is that the studying of acting and performance within our field, film studies, is vibrant and goes back to at least as early as James Naramore comes to mind for me, and this is someone who's just appreciated this work from afar, but also thinking about scholars like Cynthia Barron and Sharon Carnegie and then Isaac Butler's more recent book. And so I'm just curious about how you see your work in conversation with those folks and kind of furthering this conversation that you see by your own words as kind of a, you know, I believe you said it was, was it noisy or loud or at least one where, you know, you admit that there's A lot of work that's been done here already. And I think that this is one of the challenges that a lot of us face is when we want to talk about something that has a pretty solid foundation and find a space for ourselves within it.
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Justin Owen Rollins
Right, yeah, exactly. And I think that the work that you mentioned, and there's a lot of work that's been done over the last, oh, especially the last decade or so, but we can go as far back as Narramore's work and the work of several other folks, and that's doing really vital service in carving out a space in the film text for a critical understanding of how acting creates meaning, how it contributes meaning to the overall significance of the film, how we can, especially with someone like Neremore, how we can kind of take on an analytical frame. He talks about the performance frame for how we would study the. The way that meaning is generated by performance in a film. And you might notice that the recurring thing here is we're. We're talking about film centric analysis. And that's incredibly important because, you know, historically film media studies has not paid too much attention to screen acting. We attended far earlier to the idea of the star, the celebrity, but not to the craft of performance on screen. And so my intervention is to really work with the screen centric approaches to performance and think about what happens contextually, paratextually. Like how are those meanings created in those spaces outside the film contributing to how we attach meaning to performances on film, to film performances? Because in my own training as a reception studies scholar, I know that there's a lot of that work happening outside of those things. I mean, some people, you know, some people may not even watch a movie, but they consume a lot of trailers. I talk about this a bit with work on Tom Cruise that, you know, far more people have experienced Tom Cruise cinematic stunt work by watching making of shorts on YouTube and trailers than have actually watched the Mission Impossible films. Right. Um, so just thinking about how those, how those spaces outside of the film can become really important venues for helping us make sense of how, how screen performance takes on meaning. And I think that's a space where we look to understand how an idea of method acting has taken on a life of its own and largely superseded the practices of method acting and how it ends up drawing in all of these different people who are not method actors, but they can get sucked in. The Jeremy Strongs and the Montgomery Cliffs and the Daniel Day Lewis's. They're not method actors and they have all in their own respective ways Articulated as much, but there's this gravitational pull and this received idea of method acting that kind of gets. Sucks them in and brands them as method actors, either explicitly or we get the kind of discourse about Daniel Day Lewis stayed in character for the entirety of this film and became a cobbler and. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Pete Kunze
So I'm hoping we can take that a step further. And I apologize for this question being reminiscent of a dissertation defense, but I'm hoping you can talk a bit about methodology because, you know, I think this is the thing that constantly fascinates me about the work we do is how do we do it? Right. I mean, you know, and what are the ways into these questions? And I dabbled a bit in performance analysis recently and realized that I really had to. I had to think of new methods for how I had normally done my own research. Right. And thinking about, you know, like, do you do thick description? Right. And thinking about different kind of facets of paying attention to gesture and voice and corporality. Right. But I want to hear you talk. So, like, for you, when you were kind of coming at method from, let's say, the. The. The angle of reception. Right. How did you kind of structure your research so you could tell this story?
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Justin Owen Rollins
That's a great question. And this is something that I puzzled over for quite a long time because there. I think that there's a. There are two intertwined, entangled methods that I. That I employed here, which is, you know, historical analysis and discursive analysis. And each of those, they are so generative in terms of what they can yield. But for someone like me who is obsessive about trying to be a completist, there are a number of real challenges in terms of where do you draw your boundaries so that you're not doing. You're not just drafting and researching until the end of time. And when working on a dissertation, that's one of the ways that my advisor and my committee were great and just saying, you know what? Just stop there and work with what you have. But once you are working on your book, there's not as much of that.
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Pete Kunze
Right.
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Justin Owen Rollins
You don't have as many of those guardrails. So that's where I. That's one of the primary motivations behind breaking this book down and reorganize it into a series of vignettes so that I was. So I was artificially circumscribing the extent to which, you know, I framed this particular chapter diachronically and just how much of the extent of the discourse that I looked at synchronically. So in some cases, those decisions are made for me by the availability of materials. In the case of something like the chapter on James Dean, just to give one example, that chapter is built around a body of letters written to Hedda Hopper. And we have to acknowledge that the letters that Hedda Hopper retained and donated to the Herrick Library are not indicative of all the letters that she received.
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Pete Kunze
Right.
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Justin Owen Rollins
But they still can be illustrative of how many audience members made sense of James Dean, tried to work with Hedda Hopper to appropriate an interpretation of James Dean toward their own kind of ideological ends. So, you know, I found as a, as a reception scholar that, you know, and as someone who has long approached my work historically, that doing discourse analysis works really well with historical analysis. At the same time, the things that make them so generative also make them incredibly challenging to reign in. This book could have easily been 500 pages. I don't know that anyone would want to read that. But there's just. There's so much raw material that. Trying to rein that in and trying to elicit the core threads that I think are worth taking away, that was one of the biggest challenges at work here.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah, I certainly empathize with that kind of kill your darlings mentality, right? Because on the one hand you're like, look at this cool thing I found. And on the other hand, you're like, I've got to keep someone's attention.
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Justin Owen Rollins
For.
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Pete Kunze
You know, the space. And then also presses, of course, only give us so much room. Right. So we have to learn to. To cut ourselves down. Yeah. But again, I'll save that for my. I'll save that for my therapist. So you talk a lot about paratexts in your book as well. And. And so I was hoping that we could talk about the COVID of your book, in part because I have cover envy. I think it's a really great cover.
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Justin Owen Rollins
Thank you.
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Pete Kunze
And. And I hadn't looked closely at it until I read your book. So. For those listening at home, the COVID of Justin's book is a very sultry Marlon Brando leaning up against, I guess, a wall and with his leg up and a script on his leg and a cigarette in his hand, and there's, you know, this kind of poof of smoke coming out of his mouth. And in the background, there are some men who use wheelchairs sitting at a table. Um, and this kind of becomes a useful framing device for you. Can you. Can you talk a little bit more about. I mean, no one's gonna. No one's gonna criticize you for throwing Brando on the COVID of the book. But. But. But why do you think this image of Brando in particular is. Is evocative?
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Justin Owen Rollins
Yeah, that's a great question. And I. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for your kind words about the COVID It. It was a process to get it. I didn't know that I was gonna get this cover until relatively late in the process. So this is an image. I allude to this or kick the book off with this, but this is an image that is from Life magazine's series of photographs of Brando as he's preparing for his very first film role in the Men. In the Men, he plays a soldier who is hit by a sniper and loses the use of his. His legs and has to. He goes into this VA facility and tries to kind of regain his strength. And so what Brando does is he goes to a VA facility in Birmingham in Southern California for a month, and he immerses himself in the culture there. And he tries to live everyday life like someone who does not have the use of his legs. And that work, that preparation work, is something that Life magazine documented extensively, had featured in two different profiles of Brando before the Men came out. This photo didn't end up getting published in those Life features. And it's one of the few photos from that shoot where he's shown, quote, unquote, like, not preparing.
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Pete Kunze
Right.
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Justin Owen Rollins
He's not immersed. He's standing on top of the wheelchair instead of sitting in a wheelchair, as he is in so many of the Life magazine images. And so there's that. There's this kind of moment of, all right, here's. This is not the story that that is put forth about Brando. We're given Brando engaged in this process that is extraordinary, yet also continually framed as elusive, that we. We as an audience can't really access his genius. It's kind of. It's a black box. I also use this image because Brando's not a method actor. And that's a bit of a. Of the rhetorical trick I pulled on the reader in page two or three after I lay all this out. Brando hated being called a Method actor. He resisted that label. And yet, even when he. In the conclusion, I talk about what happens when Brando dies, the New York Times is still calling him a method actor. Stella Adler's daughter is writing to the New York Times, pleading with them, please stop calling him a method actor. My mom was his teacher. My mom did not teach the Method. She hated Strasberg. She hated the Method. But these things have. There's real power in this received idea of Method acting that even when the kind of. I think we could arguably say that Brando is the most visible manifestation of method acting, when he is not a method actor, yet cannot escape that label. I think that says something about what method acting actually is and what. How we make sense of it, how we apply that. And so it's a bit of a trick on the audience. It's also, I think, a telling moment when the. From the shoot and from the narratives that came out of that. That Life magazine shoot where we get this contrast between the narrative about Brando that's put out there and the reality. And as you alluded to Pete, it's also just a really great image. Like, he just looks really, really fucking cool. I mean, pardon my French.
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Pete Kunze
I was gonna say he looks really hot, too. I mean, it's a sensual image of Brando, as many images of him were. But, yeah, no, I mean, for me, you know, that kind of important revision you make at the outset is a really useful way to kind of pull someone who is not. Not working in. In studies of film acting into your narrative and into your work. I think that that's a really useful start. And I'm hoping, you know, my next question is. Is another one that's like, Well, I spent 250 pages doing this, Pete, but I'm still going to ask it. So how have you. How have how has method been misunderstood? How has the method been misunderstood? And, and, and how does this create a space for you to introduce this idea of methodness?
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Justin Owen Rollins
Mm. So without getting into the weeds, because I think this is something that folks like Sharon Konicki and Cynthia Barron and others have done really exceptionally well in terms of what the tenets of method acting actually are. What I think has happened is that there emerged at some point a received idea of method acting that emphasized the idiosyncrasies of certain performers and conflated those with their acting style. Right. That conflated certain characteristics of star behavior, of unprofessional behavior, that conflated a kind of connection to a character's inner life and a character's history with a kind of extreme, almost psychological, psychoanalytic understanding of human nature. I mean, a lot of that this has been written about by Baron and Carnegie and a few others. But it's not a coincidence that the popular awareness of method acting really takes off the 1950s. It dovetails quite nicely with a kind of popular understanding, misunderstanding about psychoanalysis and looking inward and things like that. Right. However, it has already, by that time, become this really fraught. This fraught idea. I mean, we have a. We have a big breakup in the 1930s, 1934, between Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler and a group of others who are all members of this organization called the Group Theater. Sanford Meisner is in there, Harold Kluhrman, Phoebe Brand, Morris Karnosky, eventually Elliot Kazan. And it's all of these titans of 20th century acting, either as practitioners, but more often than not, as pedagogues. And for the first two and a half, three years of the existence of this group, Lee Strasberg was essentially their de facto teacher of this acting style. But people were almost from the get go in the group, a little suspicious. I don't know, this emphasis on, you know, bearing our souls and making ourselves really vulnerable, that seems potentially exploitative. Still, Adler is among these. So still Adler, you know, she's in Paris after she and Klorman and Strasbourg have gone to visit the Moscow Art Theater. She stays behind in Paris and she actually studies with Stanislavski. And she comes back and confronts Lee in front of everyone. And, you know, she. She does her version of the, you know, I knew Jack Kennedy. I served with Jack Kennedy. You, sir? No, Jack Kenny. She tells him, like, what you're talking about, what you're teaching here. Lee is not. Is not Stan Slavski's system. I studied with the man just now here's and she has a whole chart. Here's, here's a system and it's that like we have in 1934, this schism, right, that is never resolved. Those two despise each other for the rest of their lives. And yet by the 50s, their very different approaches to acting just get kind of collapsed into one. Same for Sanford Meisner. You know, he and Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg had in, in many ways very different approaches to performance, to thinking about like what the, what the, the, you know, our instrument is as actors. But you would have a hard time discerning that difference in the kind of popular discursive networks that just kind of characterize it all as, as method acting. They are all part of a larger tradition, right. What we could call Slavic dramatic realism. People like Vakhtengav and Stanislavski and Boleslavski and Usmanskaya and so on and so forth. But that's a really big tent. And so for those very different approaches to acting to get kind of collapsed and referred to as method acting and then to then get associated with Strasberg in the Actors Studio was something that drove people like Brando crazy. And he, he argued against that just about anytime he could for 50 years to no avail. And so to me, there's something really, really fascinating about having the most visible, quote, unquote, method actor constantly disavowing that to, you know, and having no effect. That tells me that this thing has just taken on such an outsized presence in popular culture. And, and so I think that we tend to, in the way that we think about and talk about method acting, we tend to fall back on those kind of spectacularized ideas of method acting, which admittedly are. Those kinds of discursive tropes are just very click worthy. They're very interesting, they're very salacious. Right. You know, I don't know that as many people would be interested in getting into the weeds of Jeremy Strong's actual approach to acting, when in fact it's far more compelling to read about how he, you know, puts himself through the wringer when he's playing Kendall Roy. Right. It's far more compelling to see Brian Cox say, oh, I fear for his safety, when that has little or nothing to do with anything that's actually method acting. I think it just can't hold the actual techniques don't hold a candle in our kind of media culture to the far more spectacular discourse of Methodists.
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Pete Kunze
Yeah. And I'm hoping you can take that a bit further. You, one of the things that I particularly appreciated in your analysis was its engagement with critical whiteness studies. Right. I had a vague sense that method discourse had. Has always already been gendered, but I hadn't fully appreciated until reading your work, how it was also racialized. So can. Can you offer us that kind of a brief snippet of the kind of the intersexual analysis you offer there?
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Justin Owen Rollins
Yeah. I mean, yeah. So knowing. Knowing the history of method acting and the history of this kind of broader umbrella of dramatic realism, you know, you. You very quickly encounter that it's a. There's a very wide world of people practicing, teaching these approaches, even within the smaller world of actual, like, method acting. Method actors. Right. You just look at the roles of the. Of the actor studio and you realize, oh, my gosh, there are all, you know, I didn't know many of these people, you know, were. Were part of that. That tradition. So there's that. Right. There's that kind of obvious that. That juxtaposition. So in looking at the. The reception around. Around people, looking at the reception of, you know, someone like Sidney Poitier, who studied at the Actors Studio and someone like Marlon Brando who, you know, only very, very briefly did, and he said he didn't actually get anything out of it. One of the things I kept running up against is just the kind of affordances in Methodists around white performers, that there's a kind of praise bestowed on white men for the labor of inhabiting another. Right. The labor of. Of becoming, you know, a person with mental illness or the labor of. Of losing weight or gaining weight or, you know, immersing themselves in a VA hospital for a month. There's a kind of. Of outsized praise given to those. The.
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Pete Kunze
The.
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Justin Owen Rollins
The kind of received idea of the work that goes into that. Conversely, for women, for performers of color, there seems to be an assumption that there isn't as much work to get to a place like that. In the book, I talk about Charlize Theron and how the discourse around her in Monster and in Tully, both films where she underwent a kind of body transformation, which is really, really extreme. I wouldn't recommend any performer do that. I'm glad to see that there's more critical opposition to that in this day and age. But there's a big difference in how her labor and her process was framed and received than in someone like Christian Bale, where the work itself was praised. Now, for someone like Charlize Theron, it was much more about, well, when will she return to her kind of Normative body type. Right. For someone like I talk about Brian Tyree Henry as well, and someone asked him if he was a method actor when he was doing the series Atlanta and he was like, no. Because there is no. If I tried to do what my white counterparts do in other productions, I would be fired. There is not the kind of allowance for me to engage in outlandish behavior, to behave badly, to stay in character, things like that. So there's this, I think in its most kind of basic sense, there's a kind of wide affordance given to white, white actors under the kind of. With the permission of Methodists to. To act badly, to act in extreme idiosyncratic ways. And those historically and to this day are not provided to performers of color. And I mean, and, and you know, the industry, you can look at how the industry abets this in terms of who it cast for certain kinds of films, who gets award nominations and wins. Right. You know, it very much dovetails with the racialized way in which Hollywood tends to convey value onto people and the work that they do.
- [39:24]
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- [40:19]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, I was hoping we could, we could pivot a bit from. I guess this isn't a total pivot, but I wanted to think about the resistance to method. Right. You mentioned both people worried about methods implications on the actor's well being and actors vocalizing that there's a certain level of, one wants to say almost egotism that comes with method. Right. You know, because you're supposed to be working with a collective and yet one person is perceived as doing method. And as you know, they want to be addressed as character or throwing it.
- [40:56]
Justin Owen Rollins
You know, we're thinking Leto shutting down the Production of Morbius for prolonged periods because he wants to stay in character with his leg braces and use the restroom. Like, in character. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:09]
Pete Kunze
You know, Daniel Day Lewis. And I was thinking, you probably remember, well, the discourse around Jim Carrey and Man in the Moon, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So who is not a method actor? And I think the example that comes to mind for me, and maybe the story is apocryphal, right. Is this kind of confrontation between Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man. And I kept trying to find, like, what the jab was. And it kind of varies on the account, Right. Like he says, like, oh, why don't you just try acting? Or, like, do your job or something like this. Right.
- [41:47]
Justin Owen Rollins
My dear boy, have you tried acting? That kind of thing?
- [41:49]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I guess the question can alternate between, say, either, you know, what are the competing traditions at the same time, or more so it might also yield into a question of, you know, the kind of. The pushback from. Especially from within the acting community towards this. This approach.
- [42:15]
Justin Owen Rollins
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that, you know, we can. We can look back to the 1970s, early 1980s, and see. See a shift in. In the reception of method acting away from one that was, like, primarily a kind of irreverence, even if it kind of misunderstood an acknowledgement that it's different or strange. I think there's a shift toward not only just the outright entrenchment of Methodists where we see the word method being used less and less, and we see instead talk about absorption and commitment and staying in character and these kinds of signals of Methodists. But I think it really becomes binarized. I think it becomes a matter of reverence or revulsion that there are these two extremes. And we can look at how people react to Jared Leto as someone who just engages in behavior that is disruptive, that often overshadows the movie, you know, the. The ultimate film itself. We can see the kind of way in which Daniel Day Lewis's performances are. Are. Are routinely understood as, you know, maybe a bit silly in the way he stays in character. But ultimately, it's the, you know, the end product is like, oh, my gosh, here he is again, showing off his extraordinary, you know, ability to act. And. And of course, that's tied back to his performance. I don't see a lot of middle ground. I don't see a lot of. Of popular effort to parse this. These received notions of acting. I see people very, very Quickly falling into one or the other camp. So when you see something like, you know, I don't know if we'll get another Daniel Day Lewis movie anymore, but when you see the New Yorker profile of Jeremy Strong, you can very quickly, very quickly see how it follows a familiar trajectory. There's a movie I talk about in the book that I think really captures this. This essence, which is Tootsie, a film that is entirely about a kind of implied and mutually understood idea of a method actor. And everyone hates this guy. He's insufferable. His agent tells him no one will work with you because you argued about the motivations of a tomato. Right. Just as one example. But the thing is that his process works. He's reviled until everyone realizes that, oh. Actually, his process makes him a phenomenal actor. And he fools everyone by his performance. Right. So that film. That film is kind of pivoting on these. These two. Around these two extremes in the popular reception of method acting. So there are so many more people who aren't method actors than are. But part of the problem is that far more people are like Marlon Brando and that they just keep getting kind of sucked into this. This. This black hole of Methodness, even as they will explicitly say, I am not a method actor. Right. But. But I think that it's. It's also, you know, I talked about the kind of how. How this reception aligns quite well with our attention economy and with, you know, our understandings of stardom and. And things like that. I also think that it probably is indicative of just how much dramatic realism shapes screen performance these days. We don't have those firm divides anymore between Laurence Olivier's and Dustin Hoffman's. It's much murkier.
- [46:33]
Pete Kunze
Right.
- [46:34]
Justin Owen Rollins
We don't have. Method acting isn't as widely taught as it was in the 1980s. There are many more traditions now that are. That are part of the process. But dramatic realism informs just about everything we see in North American film and television. So I could also see it being plausible to many people that, oh, well, it seems like it's method acting. Right. Because there's that conflation. And so anyone could potentially be a method actor if they're a. If they're a weird star, then people might be predisposed to think that they must be doing method acting. The most recent thing I saw is Isaac Butler. Sorry. Oh, my gosh, Austin Butler. Sorry, Austin Butler. And we'd already gotten the kind of Methodists around him and his role in Elvis and how he carried that performance over into the awards season. And the way he would talk. Right. And I'm seeing this again in people talking about how he would lose himself in character while filming Dune Part two. And if you look at the source material, these interviews, Butler's not talking about himself as a method actor. He's just talking about himself as an actor. And he's, you know, talks about, you know, what he does to prepare. And it's like this doesn't read as method acting, but it's the discourse communities that take that up are kind of engaged in this well worn practice of. Well, he talked about getting into character. So that's method acting. Right. And then that kind of builds into preconceived understandings and then we're kind of off to the races. Right, right. And I think there's something really profound going on there that's far outside the power of any performer. Right. And any one performance.
- [48:44]
Pete Kunze
So I wanted to ask, where is the method at today? Like the literal method? Not what we've ascribed to be the method. Right. But I mean, you know, I don't know if you have a sense of what acting schools are or aren't teaching. Right. We hear some people are coming out of the Meisner tradition. Right. Or they say, you know, I studied with a student of so and so. Right. So where is method now? And at the same time, you know, do we see actors who are embracing like, no, I am in the method tradition.
- [49:21]
Justin Owen Rollins
That is a great question. I don't actually know where the, the literal method is at right now. I mean, I will say, and this is, this is something a few folks have talked about. Isaac Bellar talks about this quite nicely. But like, you know, the method is overrepresented in our discourse. I think it's under. I think it's, it's now one of many, many, many different approaches to performance that actors are getting in this day and age. I mean, the, you know, that there are still, there are still a lot of people that practice, you know, the kind of Strasberg inflected approach to performance. Same could be said for Stella Adler. The Stella Adler School still going strong, you know, still a lot of Meisner adherence, you know, and there's just. There's there have been subsequent generations of their students who put their own spin on things. You know, there's the, you know, a whole, gosh, three or four generations now, people that have come out of the Juilliard tradition.
- [50:28]
Pete Kunze
Right.
- [50:29]
Justin Owen Rollins
I think there's a lot of performers that are coming out of improv traditions and the People who were improv comedy scenes and the teachers kind of involved in those approaches. So I think it's just a much more crowded area and there are still, the method still exists, but part of the challenge is that it's just so overrepresented in terms of the way that we talk about it.
- [51:01]
Pete Kunze
Overrepresented and misrepresented. Right. I think that you make that pretty clear as well. So thank you for that. What are you currently working on? Are you continuing to examine the methods resonances or has your research headed in a new direction?
- [51:18]
Justin Owen Rollins
So in my conclusion I return to Brando briefly. Not only his passing and how he's received in death, but also this very interesting thing that he tried to do in the 1990s where he tried to, he worked with a cinematographer and this, this really, this really great guy who I had the, the privilege of getting to know and writing this book. They worked on trying to create a digital double for Brando. And now, you know, I, I can't speak to what his, all of his intentions were with that. My, I'm given to understand that for him it was a matter of, he was, you know, had grown rather tired of acting, but he thought a digital double could do the work for him. And so, you know, they did all of these scans of his face with the idea of, you know, creating that, that, that inventory that they could piece together and make performances. And you know, they produced a very short film. It didn't do very well, but then it kind of largely went away. I think there's something I think that's a very fascinating precursor to what's been happening especially in the last few years with an increasing shift by some entities in the media industries toward bringing together AI and screen performance. So one of the things that's, that's really left me both fascinated and concerned is about how our prevailing understandings of something like method acting can literally end up becoming encoded in future screen performances. So that's where the book, Book One ends and that's where book Two begins. So the, this next project is going to explore the historical and present relationship between AI and screen performance. How received notions of acting work among, you know, folks in the industry, audiences, critics. A lot of, there's a lot of really interesting kind of non traditional players getting involved in this. A lot of small tech firms, legal firms, who are trying to get on the ground floor of imagining these new AI digital actors. And so I'm really keen to try to make sense of what's going on there. And that's, we'll see where that goes, but that's. That's where it's starting.
- [54:31]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. That seems like it could pull you into art and technology and intellectual property law. And that sounds really intellectually satisfying.
- [54:40]
Justin Owen Rollins
And as. And as a historian, you know, this is a bit different for me because I'm used to dealing with, you know, talking about method.
- [54:46]
Pete Kunze
Right.
- [54:46]
Justin Owen Rollins
Like our methodologies. I'm used to sitting in an archive and working with, you know, somewhat static materials. I mean, gosh, trying to write about AI right now is. It's. It's head spinning. So it's. I. I like it because it's. It's a new. It's. It's pushing me to. To think and write in different ways, but, man, it's.
- [55:14]
Pete Kunze
It.
- [55:14]
Justin Owen Rollins
It is an entirely different beast than. Than being in an archive.
- [55:19]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then I appreciate the historical continuities you're drawing between what Brando was doing, and then I imagine some of the research that was on, like, synthespians, Right. And. And then I, as someone who. Who pays attention to live performance, I'm fascinated by these traveling hologram shows, right, with like, yeah, well, obviously Tupac's the most obvious one. But for. For those of us who are more, you know, opera nerds, the Maria Callas one, I think, is the. Doing a lot more in terms of its. Its circulation. But this is a rich terrain and. And so is the terrain you cover in your book. We've only scratched the surface, but that's the goal, right? So. So thank you for your time today, Justin. The book is Imagining the Method, Reception, Identity and American Screen Performance, available now from the University of Texas Press and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze, and this has been new books and film on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [56:33]
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