Kristen Stewart has claimed that acting is “unmasculine” and “inherently submissive”, and that male actors developed “the method” to compensate.
In an interview with the New York Times, Stewart was asked about Marlon Brando’s performance in the 1978 film Superman, and after saying she hadn’t seen the movie said that his apparent inability to pronounce the word “Krypton” correctly was “painful”. She added: “Performance is inherently vulnerable and therefore quite embarrassing and unmasculine. There’s no bravado in suggesting that you’re a mouthpiece for someone else’s ideas. It’s inherently submissive. Have you ever heard of a female actor that was method?”
“Method acting” is a term used to describe the immersive techniques derived from the practice of performance first outlined by Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski in a series of books, beginning in 1924 with My Life in Art. The style was popularised in the US by the Group Theatre in the 1930s and by the Actors Studio, which was founded in 1947. Notable female students at the Actors Studio include Ellen Burstyn, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Melissa Leo and Marilyn Monroe.
Stewart went on to say that “men are aggrandised for retaining self” and that “if a woman did that, it would be different”. She added: ‘“If you have to do 50 push-ups before your closeup or refuse to say a word a certain way … There’s a common act that happens before the acting happens on set: if [male actors] 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.”
At the same time, Stewart objected to the idea that female actors are somehow emotionally unbalanced. Saying that “the ‘Krypton’ thing is so defensive”, she said: “I asked a fellow actor: ‘Have you ever met a female actor that was method and needed to scream and do a whole thing?’ As soon as I said ‘male actor, female actor’ … he goes, ‘Oh, actresses are crazy.’ Then I was like: hold on a second. You just called me crazy! Cool. So now we’re doing the typical thing where the girl’s crazy, and you didn’t even listen to anything I said?”
