How John Wayne’s twisted idea of method acting brought his greatest performance: “What if the Commies did this?”
Nobody would consider John Wayne a method actor, but in a way, a strong argument could be made that he was actually one of the most dedicated practitioners of the divisive technique in cinema history.
After all, one of the biggest recurring criticisms across his career was that ‘The Duke’ did nothing except play himself. Except he didn’t. Well, not technically, anyway. Aspiring actor Marion Morrison suffered years of disappointment and false starts when trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood, and it wasn’t until he precision-engineered a persona catered specifically to the tastes of audiences that he took off.
He worked hard to refine the mannerisms, characteristics, and traits that made him one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood and kept him at the top of the industry ladder for decades, making the mythology of John Wayne one long performance he built for himself from the ground up.
If method acting is defined by performers immersing themselves into a role for so long they begin to lose all sense of self and the lines between fact and fiction begin to blur, then isn’t John Wayne a role crafted by Marion Morrison designed with the sole intention of making him a successful actor that worked so well he absorbed it into every fibre of his being?
Of course, by its strictest definition, ‘The Duke’ wasn’t a method actor. In fact, he abhorred the technique and blamed Marlon Brando for inspiring so many inferior knock-offs. However, that only makes it more ironic that the greatest performance of Wayne’s career in arguably the greatest movie he was ever part of was indebted to the method in its own twisted way.
In John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is a complicated fellow, which is putting it lightly. He’s a racist, a bigot, and carries deep-seated prejudices that make him the sort of guy who’d gladly gun down anyone he doesn’t like while harbouring such an intense desire to protect his family that he’s willing to put everything on the line to keep them safe.
Obviously, it’s not a million miles away from his real-life persona, which in turn saw Wayne acknowledge that maybe there was a little bit of method to Ethan’s madness. “I just thought of the Apaches not as Indians but as the communists who were trying to kill me,” he told Michael Munn. “I thought, ‘What if the commies were the ones who had done this? What if they had managed to burn down my home and kill my family? You see, I can be a method actor, too.”
He wasn’t exactly channelling Brando, but Wayne nonetheless used his ongoing position as one of the staunchest anti-communist public figures on the planet to inform his performance in The Searchers. Instead of imagining what Ethan was thinking and how he’d react to his situation from a fictional perspective, ‘The Duke’ instead dived into his own psyche and imagined what he would do if it were real life and those damned commies were responsible.
