The actress said that women “can’t completely lose our minds” and completely adopt the persona of their characters because “we have things to take care of.”

Anya Taylor-Joy explains why women ‘don’t Method act’

The actress said that women “can’t completely lose our minds” and completely adopt the persona of their characters because “we have things to take care of.”

By Emlyn Travis

Emlyn Travis

Emlyn Travis is a news writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2022. Her work has previously appeared on MTV News, Teen Vogue, and NME.

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August 4, 2026 11:51 a.m. ET

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Anya Taylor-Joy at Apple TV’s “Lucky” World Premiere held at Directors Guild of America on July 13, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. Credit:

Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty

- Anya Taylor-Joy is talking Method acting.

- The actress believes women don’t Method act because they’ve got “things we have to take care of” outside of work.

- “So we can’t completely lose our minds,” she added.

Anya Taylor-Joy is sharing her theory on why women don’t Method act.

The *Dune* actress revealed in a recent Complex News interview that she believes female stars don’t employ the acting technique for their roles because they’ve got obligations they need to accomplish outside of work.

“If you’ll notice, women don’t Method act because we have things to take care of,” Taylor-Joy pointed out. “So we can’t completely lose our minds.”

Anya Taylor-Joy.

Gary Gershoff/Getty

The 30-year-old star explained that she already views acting to be a state of “controlled psychosis” even without taking it to Method levels.

“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 said. “It’s like having a sister or a roommate check in up [in my mind] for a little bit.”

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Taylor-Joy added that she’s grateful to have people in her life who understand the realities that come with a new role — and when she’s taking it too far.

“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 said.

It’s why she’s not keen to try the technique anytime soon. “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,” she said. “If you’re too invested in being an asshole then that’s not gonna be very fun.”

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While some women have taken up Method acting for roles like Hilary Swank, it’s predominantly men who have employed the technique on set. That list includes stars like Andrew Garfield, Bradley Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Adrien Brody, Jeremy Strong, and Eddie Redmayne.

Taylor-Joy isn’t the only actress who feels this way, either. Natalie Portman previously called Method acting a “luxury that women can’t afford” in a 2024 *Variety* interview, adding, “I don’t think that children or partners would be very understanding of, you know, me making everyone call me ‘Jackie Kennedy’ all the time.”

Kristen Stewart similarly told *The New York Times* in a 2025 interview that she believes men often adopt Method acting practices so that they can separate their personal selves from their vulnerable onscreen characters.

“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,” she said. “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.”

Male actors have also called out the technique, too. Mads Mikkelsen described Method acting as “bulls---” and “pretentious” in a 2022 *GQ* profile. And Brian Cox famously called his *Succession* costar Jeremy Strong’s all-or-nothing approach “f---ing annoying” in February 2023.

But other stars have defended the approach including Day-Lewis, who hit back at Cox’s claims in a 2025 interview with the *Big Issue*. “I can’t think of a single commentator who’s gobbed off about the Method that has any understanding of how it works and the intention behind it,” he said. “They focus on, ‘Oh, he lived in a jail cell for six months’ (for* In the Name of the Father*). Those are the least important details... So it pisses me off this whole ‘oh, he went full Method’ thing. What the f---, you know? Because it’s invariably attached to the idea of some kind of lunacy.”

Garfield, who fasted and remained celibate for six months to play a priest in Martin Scorsese’s *Silence*, similarly claimed there are “a lot of misconceptions” surrounding the personal practice.

“It’s not about being an a--hole to everyone on set,” he said on a 2022 visit to the *WTF With Marc Maron *podcast. “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.”

Listen to Taylor-Joy talk Method in the clip above.

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