Method acting: Actors who took it to the extreme from Jared Leto to Leonardo DiCaprio

Method acting is all the rage right now. Jeremy Strong's commitment to playing Kendall Roy on Succession has led to repeated debates about the merit behind the practice and the toll it can take on an actor's health.

Brian Cox has been a frequent critic of the method, claiming it led to Daniel Day-Lewis burning out but many of the very best throughout Hollywood's history have used the technique.

The modern method approach to acting is generally credited with being popularised by Marlon Brando who requested to have a bucket of ice water thrown over him during his first Broadway play to make him look like he had actually been thrown in an icy lake.

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Compared to some approaches, Brando is relatively tame to some more recent efforts so below we have rounded up ten of the most over the top examples of method acting in Hollywood history.

Jared Leto

There's over the top and there's just plain gross. Much was made of the fact Jared Leto did not drop his guise as the Joker during the entire shoot of Suicide Squad with him only answering to Mister J during filming.

It was also claimed that Leto sent castmates including Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Viola Davis used condoms, sex toys and live rats. Sounds like hell.

Al Pacino

In Scent of a Woman, the Hollywood great plays a blind man and in preparation for the role sought advice from the sight impaired and attended a school for the blind. To get into character, Pacino began living life as a blind man and asked the cast and crew to treat him as if he was actually blind.

Reportedly, he never once looked a co-star in the eye.

Dustin Hoffman

One of the earliest and most notorious examples of an actor going perhaps too far to attain realism for a part. In Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman played a student who is tortured by a Nazi war criminal over a plot to grab some expensive diamonds.

Read more: Actors who were massive divas on set

Hoffman's character is forced to stay awake for three days so Hoffman himself went without sleep for 72 hours causing his co-star Laurence Olivier to famously remark "My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?"

Daniel Day-Lewis

The king of crazy method acting stories, Day-Lewis always pushed his body to the limit for each of his roles. He didn't bathe for the entirety of The Crucible, he took to living in a wheelchair for My Left Foot, he lived off the land for The Last of the Mohicans and caught pneumonia on the set of Gangs of New York after refusing to wear anything other than period clothing.

Robert De Niro

Throughout his most acclaimed period in the 1970s and 80s, Robert De Niro was notorious for going to quite extreme lengths for roles including gaining a large amount of weight for Raging Bull.

But perhaps his craziest commitment for a role was 1991's Cape Fear where he asked a dentist to grind down his teeth to play rapist Max Cady. Thankfully, he also paid the dentist to put them back right afterwards.

Adrien Brody

For his Oscar winning performance in The Pianist, Adrien Brody went to extremes to portray Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist who survived the Holocaust.

He lost 30lbs, learnt to play the piano and sold his house and the vast majority of his possessions. Unsurprisingly, Brody broke up with his girlfriend at the time.

Andrew Garfield

For Martin Scorsese's Silence, Andrew Garfield has a go at really living like a Jesuit priest. The Spider-Man actor abstained from sex and starved himself of food for six months to get into the role causing him to lose a lot of weight and experience hallucinations. Garfield remains an avid user of the method.

Shia LaBeouf

You wouldn't have wanted to work with Shia LaBeouf on Fury. While it is probably the controversial actor's best performance, he also refused to wash during production of the Second World War thriller.

It was also claimed that LaBeouf pulled out one of his own teeth and had a confrontation with co-star Scott Eastwood that had to be broken up by Brad Pitt.

Christian Bale

Christian Bale has long been one of Hollywood's most intense actors and no more so than during the making of The Machinist when the Oscar-winner lost 60lbs and was sleeping two hours a night to portray a drug addict.

He later replicated the weight loss for his Oscar win in The Fighter where he played boxer turned trainer Dickie Eklund.

Leonardo DiCaprio

The Hollywood icon isn't known as a committed user of the method but he put himself through the ringer for his Oscar win on The Revenant.

For the demanding role, DiCaprio slept in animal carcasses, risked hypothermia and ate raw bison to get into the role of a 19th Century frontiersman.

Watch a trailer for Leonardo DiCaprio's next movie Killers of the Flower Moon