Working on Daniel Day-Lewis film was a ‘traumatising train wreck’, says co-star

A co-star of Daniel Day-Lewis has poured scorn on his method acting during A Phantom Thread, saying that working on the film was a “traumatising train wreck”.

Vicky Krieps starred opposite Day-Lewis in the 2017 film, playing a model muse to his high-society dressmaker.

Day-Lewis famously insists that cast and crew address him in character even when the cameras have stopped rolling.

“After half the movie, I was just really tired of it. Like: OK, I get it. It’s a game. I’ve played it. But can we just talk normally now, please?” Krieps said.

Krieps, an actress from Luxembourg, had read little about Day-Lewis before arriving on set. In an interview with The Telegraph, she said: “I never watch the films of people I’m going to work with. I don’t Google them. So I didn’t know so much about his method acting.”

She was bemused to find everyone on set tiptoeing around the “great thespian” and whispering: “He’s here! My God! It’s him!”

Krieps explained: “I am a person who thinks we are all equal. We all sit on the toilet. I could see it all like a circus. I just didn’t get afraid.”

In the film, Krieps’ character complains to Day-Lewis’s character of “you and your people and your walls and your rules,”. Krieps said: “That was really me talking to a famous actor, saying, ‘Do you really need everyone around you to behave so strangely and talk in a whisper?’”

“I decided I wasn’t going to look at him in a special way just because he’s Daniel Day-Lewis. He reacted to my feeling and played with that well.

“That dance became the movie, and in the end it was a wonderful thing.”

Krieps also said she was given “insane” media training on how to promote the film, told that she should talk only about the costumes and landscape but not her own experience.

Krieps has now taken her own lead role in new film Corsage, a biopic of Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary.

Day-Lewis has won three Oscars in his career: picking up Best Actor awards for My Left Foot in 1990, There Will Be Blood in 2008 and Lincoln in 2013.

In My Left Foot he played Christy Brown, the writer and painter who had cerebral palsy, and remained in his wheelchair throughout filming. Crew members were required to spoon-feed him.

British actors on the set of Lincoln were asked not to use their own accents in case it put Day-Lewis off his stride in portraying the former president. Whilst in character as Abraham Lincoln he sent text messages to his co-star, Sally Field, signing them: “Yours, A”.

Before shooting The Last of the Mohicans, Day-Lewis spent a month living rough in the North Carolina wilderness.

Other actors who have followed the method acting route include Jamie Dornan, who confessed that he stalked a woman while preparing to play a serial killer in The Fall.

He chose a female passenger on a train and, unbeknown to her, got off at her stop and followed her “around a couple of street corners”, later telling an interviewer: “It felt kind of exciting in a really sort of dirty way.”

Evan Peters reportedly stayed in character for months as Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix series, Monster, wearing clothes in the style of the serial killer and speaking in his voice.

The full interview will run in Review on New Year's Eve