Michael Douglas Made a Mistake When He Became a Method Actor Because of Bad Advice
Actor Michael Douglas has made a name for himself in the industry by starring in features like Falling Down and Basic Instinct. But in the earlier stages of his career, Douglas made an error in his craft by going method.
Why Michael Douglas thought he was a bad actor
Douglas didn’t catch the acting bug the same way most early actors do. His road to superstardom came when he was trying to figure out what to major in while attending college. When he chose acting, however, the Ant-Man star might not have thought that was the best decision.
“My junior year in college they said, ‘You have to declare a major, you can’t keep taking general education courses.’ So I said, ‘I guess I’ll take theatre. My mother’s an actress, my father [is an actor].’ I started acting [and] I was the worst actor you ever seen. I had the worst fear. I used to have a wastebasket offstage, where I could get sick before I go on,” Douglas once said according to Contact Music.
Douglas only considered himself a method actor one time during his long career. In the beginning, he was searching for ways to overcome his crippling stage fright. That was when he received advice that might’ve done more harm than good.
“Early on, someone made the mistake of telling me that the camera can always tell when you’re lying, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ So I turned into a method actor for a while, and then one day I realized, ‘Wait a minute, I lie every day, and there’s no thunder or lightning coming down and striking me. Acting is about lying. That’s all acting is.’ And that eureka moment changed things around a lot for me,” Douglas once told Vulture.
Michael Douglas’ father Kirk Douglas called him a bad actor
Given that both of his parents were in the entertainment business, it may seem that Douglas would always go down a similar path. But his father, Kirk Douglas, didn’t think much of his son’s skills, either. Kirk Douglas was a respected actor in his own right, and was once considered a box-office star himself. Knowing a thing or two about acting, he told his son he was awful. But it was an assessment Douglas agreed with.
“He did, and he was right,” Douglas said in a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone. “It was in those early college productions. I started getting a little better, but I had a long way to go.”
Michael Douglas didn’t feel like he was truly a good actor until ‘Fatal Attraction’ and ‘Wall Street’
It would take a while before Douglas could comfortably call himself a good actor. He’d been doing feature films and stage plays since the 60s, but it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s he felt he found his stride. The movies responsible for his newfound confidence were some of Douglas’ most memorable projects.
“Where I actually felt like I had something to offer? That would have to be the year of Fatal Attraction and Wall Street…around 1986, 1987. Up until then, I still dealt with nerves in front of a camera. I felt I was competent; I did 104 hours of a TV show [The Streets of San Francisco]. But I couldn’t tell you that I was really enjoying the process or that people were benefiting from what I was doing,” Douglas said.
He credited the box-office triumph of the popular Fatal Attraction that helped him achieve that kind of clarity.
“So it was the commercial success of Fatal Attraction that gave me the confirmation that, ‘Ok, you’re there now,’” he continued. “I think when you come from the second generation, and you don’t have that rags-to-riches story, your arc is a little smaller. It takes longer to figure out who you are. The assumption is that everything is laid out for you. And the reality is that, in an industry all about establishing your own identity, you’re being judged against your father’s persona.”
