"Method acting" is a reference to the Stanislavsky Method, a system of acting based on the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who created a formalized structure intended to teach and increase EMPATHY.
The entire framework is about enhancing awareness and understanding of one's own emotions and observing and empathizing with the emotions of others. The idea is that the most persuasive way of convincing an audience that you feel a certain emotion is to actually feel it and let your natural expressions of that feeling show, so the audience's own capacity for empathy will be engaged and they'll feel it along with you.
But before you can feel something on cue, before you can enhance your natural expression of it to be visible "in the the back row" of the audience, you have to create a internal catalogue of your own reactions to life and events; you have to learn to observe, recall, and relive as many emotional reactions as you can.
In order to do this as a character, and not just as yourself, you also have to add to that inner catalogue everything you observe OTHERS feeling. In order to have convincing reactions to situations you've never been in, you have to be able to empathize as strongly and fully as possible with people who have. You MUST be able to understand how others think and feel; you must become "a keen observer" of others' emotions and thought processes. In order to portray a sincere reaction to the given circumstances, when they are not ones you personally have ever experienced, you must be able to immerse yourself in the real-life reactions of other people around you in your daily life and add their inner states to your own repertoire. The credibility of your performance relies on how deep and nuanced your understanding of yourself and other people is.
Which means the Stanislavsky Method is a framework for learning to better empathize with others. That's literally what it teaches. Empathy. With other human beings. Empathy. Empathy. I cannot stress that sufficiently. Empathy is at the core of portrayal when you summon an emotion on cue, and empathy is at the core of the audience's belief that you genuinely feel it.
Modern "method acting" has strayed far enough from that origin it doesn't deserve the name, and it trades dishonestly on the established reputation of that century-old formal school of acting while violently rejecting its central premise.
The Stanislavsky Method is not about "provoking" fellow actors to feel a genuine response by recreating a situation THEY'VE never experienced to enhance their portrayal. That's called emotional manipulation, and when it's done to recreate a negative emotion without consent or warning it's just flat out abuse. It damages the trust between actors and thereby damages the performance as a whole.
In a competition as a teenager, I once had to portray a physically-abused wife. I had no experience of that type of domestic violence to draw on, but I did have training in the Stanislavsky Method. One of my fellow actors had to strike me in the face onstage, and I had less than a second to believably summon an entire complex set of emotions to react to it. I'd never been married, let alone struck by a man I was stuck in a physically-abusive 1950s marriage with, but I had to summarize whole decades of destroyed trust, devalued love, fear, imprisonment, determination, exhaustion, and excruciating unfounded hope in less than a second. Those characters had been married to each other more than twice as long as we teenaged actors had been ALIVE, and I had to show that in the middle of pretending to be slapped.
That was difficult for me at 15, but my fellow actor had the more difficult task; his own father physically abused his mother, and he had to come to terms with all his own intense emotions about that, at 15 years old, in order to convincingly portray the abuser.
We did not win the competition; we were disqualified because the judges believed the other actor had actually, physically struck me onstage during the performance. We were too believable. We had to recreate the scene for them repeatedly, in private, from multiple angles, before they admitted there was no physical contact and we had been wrongly disqualified.
We did NOT achieve that level of verisimilitude by my fellow actor "surprising" me by physically striking me onstage. That's lazy, and would have destroyed the chemistry and trust between us onstage and off in everything we performed together afterwards.
We achieved it by practicing the physical motions hundreds of times, while talking through things like his fear of accidentally hitting me in the face for real and feeling like he was recreating his father's abuse. He had to become his own therapist for an incredibly intense and ongoing situation in his own real life, and he had to trust me enough to let me be part of that process. I had to learn from him how his mother reacted, why she would stay with an abusive husband, why she would try to hide these facts from her teenaged son. He had to be a "keen observer" to describe this to me, and it stretched my teenage capacity for empathy and imagination to the limits to FEEL, in my own heart, everything she was going through to the greatest extent I could.
Just fucking slapping me in the face to get a "real reaction" would NEVER have produced the same result. Never. It would have produced the reaction of a teenager who had just been hit in the face by a trusted friend. And it would have done my friend and fellow actor incredible psychological damage.
Instead, it deepened the trust between us tremendously. It made us better able to portray a middle-aged married couple in general, not just during the two seconds of slap. It made us better friends, and it enhanced our ability to work together afterwards. That director cast us across from each other in everything he could after that because it made us work so well, so seamlessly together. I could turn my back to him completely during an improv scene and still know exactly what expression was on his face, what gestures he was making, how he would move, because we'd established such incredibly strong empathy with each other working on that one scene.
Robbie sending Gosling presents is the same kind of work my fellow actor did when he dug into his own personal trauma to help me recreate his mother's reactions: a consensual and deliberate attempt to help another actor understand a situation better and examine their own emotions within the recreation. It builds trust and affection between people who must, MUST trust each other on- and off-stage.
Actors don't practice trust falls for the fun of it. (It's not fun.) Trust is vital to cooperative portrayal, even when what's being portrayed is violence and betrayal. When what's being portrayed is trust and affection, developing it becomes absolutely crucial. We might have convinced the judges that he'd struck me onstage without that kind of work, but we'd never have convinced the audience that a middle-aged man had just yet again slapped a middle-aged wife he'd been married to -- and abusing -- for 40 years without it. Without the trust, it would have just been one actor fake-slapping another actor.
I'm still friends with that actor 35 years later. I can't think of him without wanting to give him a big, happy hug and hear everything about his life. I'd still trust him with my own.
Anyway, modern "method acting" is an offense to the name; it's lazy, it's damaging, it's unconvincing, and it ruins both performances and actors. It weaponizes empathy instead of building it, it often becomes justification for outright abuse, and I flinch every time I hear it mentioned because I know how incredible and outright fucking magical the alternative -- the origin of the term it exploits -- can be.