The U.K. newspaper The Telegraph was called out after claiming Vice President Kamala Harris prepped for last night's presidential debate with legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg—except that Strasberg died in 1982.
According to The Washington Post, Harris spent four days immersed in an intensive “debate camp” at Pittsburgh’s Omni William Penn Hotel. Her team recreated a mock debate stage, enlisted an experienced Trump stand-in to deliver harsh attacks and inflammatory remarks, and subjected the Vice President to hours of rehearsed questions.
None of that could have possibly involved Strasberg, a celebrated theatre director, actor and acting teacher who is considered "the father of method acting in America," an at times controversial acting technique employed most famously by actor Marlon Brando and later taken up by performers as varied as Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Yet The Telegraph, in a piece that mentioned the GOP's hopes that Trump could evoke Ronald Reagan's 1980 debate performance, claimed the following:
"Ms Harris, meanwhile, is preparing for a debate with a stand-in Trump, Lee Strasberg, an acting teacher who has been wearing a wide-shoulder boxy suit and red tie."
You can see it below.
The Telegraph
The reference to Strasberg has been removed from the article, which highlighted Trump’s complaints about Harris’s ties to a prominent executive at ABC, the network hosting the debate.
Joshua Benton, founder of Harvard’s Nieman Lab, pointed out that the reporter probably sourced the name from a New York Times piece describing “an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.”
The newspaper was widely mocked.
While we certainly can't ask Strasberg—best known to moviegoers for his performance as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II—for his thoughts about the matter, if he did manage to rise from the dead to do what The Telegraph claimed, it'd be the greatest method acting performance of all time.
