Jack Nicholson on his method acting detractors: “I’m still fooling them!”
In 2015, Jack Nicholson was chatting to fellow actor Sean Penn on the phone. The conversation eventually drifted to an article he’d seen online, compiling a long list of acclaimed method actors. Daniel Day-Lewis, Adrien Brody, and Al Pacino were likely on the list. Nicholson, however, was not.
He found it curious, given his commitment to the technique. On 1969’s Easy Rider, for instance, he smoked 155 joints during shooting just to maintain the glazy-eyed, stoned look of his character, George Hanson. He routinely terrified the crew on The Shining by shrieking “Axe! Murder! Kill!” between takes, and by all accounts, was quite vocal in advocating the acting technique. Yet he hadn’t cracked the list.
Musing on his non-appearance, he told Penn: “I’m still fooling them!” and then he told Esquire how he grew to consider it an accomplishment. “Because,” he explained, “There’s probably no one who understands method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in this work. But it’s funny – nobody really sees that. It’s perception versus reality, I suppose.”
Nicholson had also been in the process of “de-emphasising” what other actors considered character work. “The limps and lisps, the accents – I don’t want to be bothered,” he said. For him, total immersion was the only way to meaningfully engage with a character. “You gotta make it come from the inside,” he insists. “It’s all about who you are. That’s all you can really contribute. I feel autobiographical about whatever I do.”
Nicholson did this most prolifically in his first Oscar-winning role as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, playing a criminal sent to a mental institution for evaluation. Both Nicholson and his castmates spent several months living in an institution, each receiving actual group therapy and working closely with at least two or three actual patients. Nicholson, as result of his research, improvised some parts of the film.
That commitment allowed Nicholson to work in areas that were previously unknown, having got to grips with the reality of what his character experienced day to day. It remains a seminal performance and one of the most memorable of his career.
Nicholson uses classic method acting relaxation techniques devised by Lee Strasberg to remove any tension from himself that could “get in the way of getting into a role”.
As he explained: “The idea is to get the physical body, the emotional body and the mental body into neutral. Then you should be able to hear through the voice what’s actually happening inside.”
See an example of the actor working away from the camera, below.