Daniel Day-Lewis Refused to Work With Actors Taller Than Him on the Set of ‘Lincoln’
Steven Spielberg helped win Daniel Day-Lewis his third Oscar when he cast him as the titular figure in Lincoln. But his appearance as the former president might have been helped by one specific demand.
Daniel Day-Lewis insisted to be the tallest actor on set while shooting ‘Lincoln’
Day-Lewis indulged in a bit of method acting to become the former president. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt famously recalled how he didn’t even really meet his co-star. While on set, Day-Lewis was simply Lincoln.
The actor spent a year studying as much as he could about his character before doing the role. This meant going over Lincoln’s own writings, and using his instincts to come up with the voice for his character. Since there are no recordings of Lincoln, Day-Lewis’ tone as the president was all up to his imagination.
“All that we know of him are the static images,” Day-Lewis said. “Everything else is up for grabs. What usually happens for me if I’m lucky — if I’m lucky — is that I begin to hear a voice at some point in my inner ear and if it pleases me I then set about the work of trying to reproduce it. And that’s it. I talk to myself a lot,” Day-Lewis once told The Los Angeles Times.
But what was documented about the president was his height. Abraham Lincoln stood at 6 feet, – 4 inches. Day-Lewis isn’t too far away from the former president’s height. According to Celeb Heights, the actor is 6 feet, – 1 inch. However, Lincoln’s height was particularly unique at a time when the average male height was much shorter than that. This made it important for the My Left Foot star to be as tall as possible on the big screen in comparison to his co-stars.
“Every time Steven said, ‘How ‘bout so and so?’ I said, ‘How tall is he?’” Day-Lewis said about the casting process. “It was like buying cloth by the yard. I wanted to be the tallest person in the room.”
Daniel Day-Lewis called playing Abraham Lincoln a disturbing privilege
Day-Lewis was always Spielberg’s top choice to play Lincoln. He felt so strongly that the actor was a good match for the figure that Spielberg wasn’t sure Lincoln could be made without him.
“I’ve never gone on a campaign before, I pretty much take no for an answer. It’s one of the few times in my entire life where I was not willing to accept that answer,” Spielberg once told Deadline about wanting Day-Lewis.
The Phantom Thread star thought hard about taking on the role, however. He admitted to being a bit hesitant given how important Lincoln was to history. When he decided to do the movie, he still felt the weight of Lincoln’s story on his shoulders.
“It’s a disturbing privilege. And for that very reason, I was extremely shy about taking on this wonderful task,” he said. “I’m not keen on history being tampered with to a great extent, or any extent really, and I felt with this man particularly, that it might just be impossible to find the life in him that would help tell this story. And I hope to goodness that people that do see this film will not feel that this part of their history, which is so vital, has been misrepresented.”
Steven Spielberg didn’t want to know about Daniel Day-Lewis’ method acting
In an interview with The Columbus Dispatch, it was noted that Spielberg and Day-Lewis did have a lot of conversations regarding Lincoln. But Spielberg never talked openly with Day-Lewis about the process he used to get into character.
“I never once looked the gift horse in the mouth. I never asked Daniel about his process. I didn’t want to know,” Spielberg said.
But Day-Lewis didn’t like talking openly about his method acting, anyway.
“There’s a tendency now to deconstruct and analyze everything,” he said. “And I think that’s a self-defeating part of the enterprise.”
