Anya Taylor-Joy Playfully (and Rightfully) Makes a Dig at Method Acting Dudes

Anya Taylor-Joy playfully criticized method acting, joking that women don’t use the technique because they have responsibilities and “can’t completely lose our minds.”She explained that acting already feels like inhabiting someone else’s mind for 16 hours every day.She argued that method actors have a responsibility to treat crew members well and that staying completely in character could harm workplace dynamics and collaborative filmmaking on set.You probably won’t catch Anya Taylor-Joy method acting anytime soon. The 30-year-old actor, who stars alongside Drew Starkey in the Apple TV series Lucky, got candid about her qualms with the technique during an interview with Complex published on Tuesday, August 4.While speaking with journalist Jillian Superstar, Anya playfully made a dig at her male peers who have used the approach while working on certain projects.“If you’ll notice, women don’t method-act because we have things to take care of,” she said, adding, “So, we can’t completely lose our minds.”Elsewhere during the interview, Anya admitted that she already feels like acting is “controlled psychosis” without the intensity of going method.“You are pretending to be somebody else and having their thoughts 16 hours a day and moving like them, in their house, in their clothes,” she shared. “It’s like having a sister or a roommate check in up there for a little bit.”The Queen’s Gambit alum added that her loved ones have kept her in check from time to time as she prepares for certain roles. “Sometimes, if it gets a little bit out of hand, they’ll call me by the character name and be like, ‘Yo. We need to check in again,’” she explained.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.She continued, “I can’t imagine keeping it up all the time because, again, you’re going to work with hundreds of people and it is your responsibility to be good to them and to help them do their best job. If you’re too invested in being an asshole, then that’s not gonna be very fun.”Stephane Cardinale - Corbis//Getty ImagesJerod Harris//Getty ImagesActors including Marlon Brando, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jeremy Strong have locked into method acting for different roles over the years.Andrew Garfield also famously stayed celibate and fasted for six months to play a priest in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film, Silence, and explained why the “misconception” about method acting bothered him during a 2022 interview on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast.“It’s not about being an asshole to everyone on set,” he explained. “It’s actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to, and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”Anya isn’t the first woman in the biz to clock how men are more likely to go method, (though, for the record, female stars like Lady Gaga and Hilary Swank have also employed the technique).Kristen Stewart criticized method acting during an interview with The New York Times in 2025, saying, “There’s a common act that happens before the acting happens on set: If they can protrude out of the vulnerability and feel like a gorilla pounding their chest before they cry on camera, it’s a little less embarrassing. It also makes it seem like a magic trick, like it is so impossible to do what you’re doing that nobody else could do it.”Couldn’t have said it better myself, Anya and K-Stew.