The host spoke on Andrew Garfield's no sex policy during his film, 'Silence,' on 'The Drew Barrymore Show.'
Drew Barrymore has no problem abstaining from sex. During Tuesday's episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, the 47-year-old actress and talk show host spoke about Andrew Garfield and his method acting practices, which included abstaining from sex and food, for six months for his role as a Jesuit priest in the 2016 Martin Scorsese film, Silence.
"Well, I get abstaining from sex, I did that my entire 20s," Drew Barrymore Show contributor, Ross Matthews, said during the show's "Drew's News" segment.
"I was like, 'What’s wrong with me that six months doesn’t seem like a very long time?' I was like, 'Yeah, so?'" Barrymore agreed.
"I mean we buried the lead there, that’s the headline, 'Drew can go six months, no big deal,'" Ross quipped.
"Oh, years," Barrymore added.
Barrymore knows a thing or two about method acting. It's a practice she's employed herself, specifically while in her Golden Globe-winning role of Edie Beale in Grey Gardens.
"There are lots of actors who have, Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Matthew McConaughey, you do want to transform and fully commit, so I understand that," Barrymore said of the sometimes-controversial acting method. "I definitely on certain projects, like when I was doing Grey Gardens this film I did where I played this beloved real-life woman Edie Beale…"
"I was so nervous I didn’t really chit chat with everybody on set, I just really stayed in character, or her," she continued.
Garfield spoke about diving into the role for Silence, during an August episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast, and the lengths he went to embody the 17th-century priest.
"I had an incredibly spiritual experience. I did a bunch of spiritual practices every day. I created new rituals for myself. I was celibate for six months, and fasting a lot, because me and Adam [Driver] had to lose a bunch of weight anyway," he said. "There were all the spiritual practices we got to do while we were praying, meditating, having all the intentions we had as those characters. It was very cool, man. I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food for that period of time."
Garfield was first drawn to method acting after he screen-tested with Ryan Gosling for a project.
"I was overwhelmed. I was like, 'This guy has figured something out. He's doing something on a deeper level here,'" Garfield recalled of Gosling. "... He was alive. He didn’t care about doing it the same way over and over again. He was listening, he was very present, he was spontaneous, he was surprising. He wasn’t trying to be those things, he was just present."
"There was a Zen quality to it, but it was like being in a scene with a wild animal where you didn't know whether he was going to kiss you or kill you," he added. "And then you kind of hook into that. You go, 'Oh, I want to follow whatever that is.'"
Eventually, Garfield said he was able to connect with Gosling's acting coach, Greta Seacat, who got him into the practice of method acting.
"There's been a lot of misconceptions around what method acting is, I think," Garfield shared. "... People are still acting in that way, and it’s not about being an a**hole to everyone on set. 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."
"I'm kind of bothered by the misconception," he continued. "I'm kind of bothered by this idea of 'method acting's f**king bulls**t.' It's like, no, I don't think you know what method acting is if you're calling it bulls**t."
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