8. Daniel Day-Lewis - The Ballad of Jack and Rose
The Commitment: The daddy of thespy commitment, Daniel Day-Lewis is almost three decades-worth of method anecdotes rolled into one man. He learnt Czech for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tracked and killed his own food for The Last of the Mohicans, and learnt to box to a professional standard for The Boxer. However, the focus here is on The Ballad of Jack and Rose; it may have been directed by his wife Rebecca Miller, but that didn't stop Day-Lewis going to his usual extremes, moving out of their family home to go live in isolation, eking out a quiet existence to better play a man used to solitude. He also built his own furniture while he was there, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
The Result: A typically great performance from Day-Lewis, buried in a film that made critics shrug and that audiences didn't even know existed. It's an anomaly in that so many Day-Lewis films before and since have been hyped into major events, yet The Ballad of Jack and Rose is one of the few pictures of the actor's that saw his legendary commitment go to waste. Still, it's one worth tracking down, if only to see the actor at his most uncharacteristically subdued and naturalistic.