Spider-Man: Homecoming is one of the biggest movies in this year! The movie made millions of dollars and in the process made Tom Holland a house hold name.
So what kind of acting technique did the young actor use for the role of Spider-Man? The infamous acting technique – Method Acting.
Last December, Holland did a Facebook Live interview. n the interview, Holland discussed how he prepared for the role of Spider-Man. Since, he didn’t really know what American high school was like, he decided to go undercover to a real high school in New York City.
“No one knew who I was or what I was doing. I had a fake name and fake accent. I went to a school [in London] where you had to wear a suit and tie, and it’s all boys. For me, it was the first time I was in a classroom with girls. It was a really strange experience. It was really fun.”
In fact, no body really noticed except one girl who said there was something strange about Holland. Holland explained that while he was in character walking around the high school, he told one fellow student his big secret.
“I started doing an English accent and I was like, ‘I have a secret. I’m actually Spider-Man.’ She was like, ‘Dude, you’re nuts. You are literally the craziest guy I’ve ever met in my life.’”
But what is method acting?
Method acting is not a dangerous form of acting. In fact, method acting is not made specifically for film. It’s derived directly from the work of Stanislavski, Eugene Vahktangov, and Meyerhold and hundreds of actors use it every day without any trips to the mental hospital. One of the biggest parts of method acting is “Sense Memory”. Sense Memory: This is a process by which your brain, remembering the sensation of a previous sensory experience, will recreate that experience. Think about your favorite food. Can’t you almost taste it? Smell it? See its details in the air if you focus? That’s sense memory. Strasberg created a large system of exercises to train the actor to re-experience basic sensory experiences. Some of his exercises were created to simply gain the reality of something, such as tasting a food or feeling a temperature that is not actually there.
So when Tom Holland was preparing for the role of Spider-Man: Homecoming by attending a school in New York, when it came time for filming, he simply remembered his feelings and experiences he had while at a high school.
The same thing can be said for an actor who is playing an evil character. They can do evil things, to become more and more like they antagonist they will be portraying. Jared Leto said he used method acting for the role of Joker in the movie Suicide Squad.
According to E!, Leto sent creepy gifts to his fellow ‘Suicide Squad’ cast and crew members. For example, Leto sent Margot Robbie a nice love letter with a rat in it. In addition, Leto sent bullets to Will Smith. Not to mention sending the entire cast a video of a dead pig. Even Shia LaBeouf is known for pushing the limits of method acting. In the movie Fury, Shia LaBeouf scarred himself and removed a tooth in order to get into character. So the next time you hear the term “method actor” an actor is simply reliving previous experiences and doing them again but this time on screen.
