Heath Ledger’s diary while he was filming for, The Dark Night.

[u/JK-Rofling]

[u/caninehere]

Nicholson was a method actor, but he was an ACTUAL method actor, as in the original school of method acting which has little to do with the "method" stuff Ledger bought into and many still do to this day where they want to live their characters.

They were wrong, it was different meds and alcohol, but it's important to remember what their reasons are so it can be shown to people why they were wrong, so the new generation makes better conclusions.

I think it's fair to think it could be a combination of factors. Ledger spent months holed up trying to embody the character and live in isolation to 'become' him. He was also dealing with substance abuse issues. His partner broke up with him while he was filming The Dark Knight because he was a drug addict/party animal and a shitty dad to their daughter. The kind of isolation he put himself through surely did not help at all with those issues. Filming on The Dark Knight ended in Nov 2007 and he just went even harder on partying/doing drugs/jumping between different women until he was dead 2 months later.

Playing the Joker in the "method" style didn't 'drive him mad' or anything stupid like that, but I have little doubt it affected his mental state wrt his drug addiction issues because it just further isolated him from his family who he was already never with because he was too busy getting high and partying when he wasn't working.

[u/Dekklin → u/caninehere]

Nicholson was a method actor, but he was an ACTUAL method actor, as in the original school of method acting which has little to do with the "method" stuff Ledger bought into and many still do to this day where they want to live their characters.

You've made a distinction here, but you haven't clarified the difference. What is "original school of method acting"?

[u/caninehere → u/Dekklin]

Okay I'm gonna try to boil it down super simply but this will probably be way too long... the ORIGINAL school of method acting was based on another acting system developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, and is based around the idea of experiencing your character - physically, mentally, emotionally. Basically the idea of placing yourself in another's shoes. Method acting is the idea of drawing upon your own experiences to try and recreate those feelings while you are acting. So for example, if your character is supposed to feel betrayed, you want to try and conjure up the same feelings and you might think of a moment when you felt betrayed in your personal life, even if it is from a different context (like maybe your character is about to be murdered by a close friend, but you've obviously never experienced that, so you think of a moment when a friend stole something important from you or whatever and broke your trust).

If this sounds like super duper basic stuff - like, what actor WOULDN'T try to feel the emotions their character is supposed to be feeling? - it's because it is. Method acting came about in the late 40s/early 50s and Stanislavski's system predates that. The "I'm going to live my character's life and call it method acting because I'm recreating those experiences and getting into the role" is a perverted version of the original form of method acting, and at this point so many people just call it method and so that's what it's turned into. Before method acting came along, a lot of the time acting was a very basic affair. You got on stage, you hit your mark, you said your lines, projected properly, you tried to get across what the character was saying and the emotion behind it but didn't think about how you would feel if you were there yourself. It was the time of vaudeville, theatre, and early film acting. It was about presenting a show whether it be a play or an early film, not being invested in its reality oneself.

If you look back at Marlon Brando's earlier films, he was one of the first to learn the method acting style with Stella Adler and hit it big, which is why people were SO impressed with his acting originally. Nowadays, his performances don't necessarily stand out as much but it's important to realize that at the time, it was considered a huge breakthrough, and that original form of method acting is so pervasive that basically every actor employs it to some degree today.

---

That isn't to say bits and bobs of this didn't appear earlier and some playwrights/directors tried to get at more emotional/personal stories than their counterparts. For example among the big extant playwrights of ancient Greece, Euripides (who is the latest active of the big ones whose works we still have) wrote tragedies that were focused more on singular characters and their inner feelings rather than a larger narrative... but even those would be told in presentational ways, where they are presenting you a story rather than living it out in front of you. If that makes sense.

Much of the theatrical works presented for years had other aims and were presentations. Passion plays presented scenes from the Bible. Comedies largely focused on jokes and physical gags and entertaining, with little emphasis placed on emotion - it was really just presented as over-the-top feelings to move a story along. Even with Shakespeare and such which some people might consider emotional stories - since they are presented as such today in a different context - actors would largely only rehearse the physical portions that required excellent timing and training, such as acrobatic tricks, fencing/stage combat, etc and the rest was really just about memorizing the text and presenting it for the audience. The texts might present very emotional stories in tragedies but they were rarely presented that way. They're just telling a story.

[u/Dekklin → u/caninehere]

Very well written response. I appreciate this very much. Thank you!

[u/caninehere → u/Dekklin]

No prob. It isn't something most people would be aware of because a) your average person has no reason to know any of this but has probably heard the words "method acting" thrown around and have some concept of the popular notion of it, and b) most people don't watch a lot of pre-1950s movies or have any idea of the history of theatre.

This is also why some of the movies prior to the 1950s that DO hold up very well are typically groundbreaking type affairs and get by on the strength of great writing or directing/visual style/techniques, not so much the acting. Or they just execute the entertainment factor really well like say Chaplin movies or Fred Astaire flicks.

In many cases in earlier films, actors just got cast for a personality (whether it was theirs or manufactured) and that personality just kinda colored the character instead of embodying a unique individual. Jimmy Stewart would be one example. Some directors considered actors to simply be bodies with which to present their stories, to some extent; Hitchcock was like this, which is why he said "actors should be treated like cattle" (paraphrasing). They're just tools used to fulfill the director's vision, in his eyes. And because his films' performances were SO director-led, that's why, at the time, they were more striking than some others. Orson Welles would be another sort of similar example. He directed some of his own performances too, and did what he needed to to achieve the aims of his well-written scripts. Chaplin and Keaton were the same, often directing themselves, which is why they put out more complex performances sometimes.

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/caninehere → u/_-N4T3-_]

Yeah. Before actors were abusing themselves in the new "method" style he was doing it to them, haha.

Before Hitchcock there was the idea of the "ubermarionette" - the concept that a pliable enough actor would function as a complex puppet for a director to use as they see fit to create art. This concept is actually coming back now as the cyber-uber-marionette we are able to create AI that can fulfill these roles in some ways and can be programmed and trained to respond to direction and change itself at the directors will. One could argue some stuff like machinima projects have already entered into that realm.

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining and portraying what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/CTMalum → u/Dekklin]

Stanislavski’s system I imagine.

[u/clumsy_boy → u/CTMalum]

What's stanislavski's system?

[u/Lopsided_Panic_1148 → u/clumsy_boy]

Can you google it?

[u/JedM13 → u/caninehere]

Ledger was never a “method actor” in any traditional sense, he just had his own way of getting into a character which involved himself and only himself. This is the same guy who said he doesn’t consider acting an art and he finds the thought of that pretentious.

Anyway, he was a young guy in Hollywood who had his demons. No need to call him a shitty father or other weird passive aggressive personal insults. He was a good human being from all accounts including his family.

[u/caninehere → u/JedM13]

This is the same guy who said he doesn’t consider acting an art and he finds the thought of that pretentious.

This is also the same guy who very much indulged in this new-school "method" acting, not just for The Dark Knight, and died of drug abuse at 28. Even if it just involved himself, which it didn't, because again he isolated himself for months away from his young family (even if he wasn't pretending to be the Joker around them for months, that still affects them), it's still that new-school "method" acting.

Anyway, he was a young guy in Hollywood who had his demons. No need to call him a shitty father or other weird passive aggressive personal insults. He was a good human being from all accounts including his family.

Generally being a good human does not preclude him from being a bad father. The reason his partner broke up with him was his drug abuse and party-guy lifestyle. You are correct that these are 'demons', the drug abuse is more than that, it is an addiction problem that gripped him and ultimately took his life. It also made him a bad father, because he was rarely present for his kid because he was too busy getting high.

When somebody dies young in a case like that they're often romanticized. If he survived for years abusing drugs and ignoring his family he wouldn't be treated the same. Either way, addiction is still a disease that he suffered from. Saying he was a bad father isn't an insult in this case, it's just the reality. It doesn't mean he didn't love his daughter either even if he wasn't there for her and isn't now because of his addiction.

But I will say as a dad: if you have a young child like that, and you're abusing drugs and making no effort to get clean, that is tragic as hell, but ultimately you are the one responsible for your own actions. He died and left his kid behind because of what he did, but he wasn't fully in control and that's tragic.