Daniel Day-Lewis: I Was Never Retired
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis claims in a new interview that he never intended to retire from acting. After eight years away from the screen, he is returning soon with Anemone, directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis. His last film was Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, released in 2017.
In 1997, shortly after filming Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer, Day-Lewis moved to Florence to apprentice under Italian shoemaker Stefano Bemer. For five years before reappearing in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, he was absent from public life.
Speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of Anemone’s New York Film Festival premiere, Day-Lewis says he regrets the tone of his 2017 retirement statement: “Looking back now—I could have certainly done better at keeping my mouth shut. Talking about it feels like pretentious blather. In truth, I never intended to retire. I only stopped working in that way so I could do something else.”
He continues: “Apparently I’ve been accused of announcing my retirement twice now. I never intended to retire from anything! I just wanted to do something different for a while.”
Anemone is described as a story about “the bonds between fathers, sons, and brothers, and the ties of family,” following a man named Ray Stoker as he confronts his past in a remote region. The film also stars Samantha Morton, Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, and Safia Oakley-Green.
Day-Lewis says he felt “a lingering grief” during his absence from acting: “Because I knew Ronan was going to make a film, and I had stepped away from it. I thought, isn’t it beautiful if we could create something together, and protect it in a way that didn’t necessarily need all the machinery of big productions. So essentially, we started with an idea about two men in a cabin. [laughs.]”
Day-Lewis’s representative said in 2017 that he “will no longer be working as an actor.” That statement added: “This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on it.”
In the new interview, Day-Lewis explains: “It was just a lowly fear, an anxiety about re-engaging with the film business. I always loved acting. Never, ever has my passion for it diminished. But there were aspects of the way of life that I could never reconcile with—from the day I started until now. That process has a quality that leaves me feeling empty at the end. I knew it, I understood it was part of the process, and at the end there’s renewal.”
Known for his method acting, Day-Lewis often lived as his characters off-camera. About Anderson’s Phantom Thread, he says: “And in that last experience, I strongly felt that perhaps renewal would never come again. That maybe it was better to step away, because I had nothing to offer.”
Still, the 68-year-old actor says Anemone has revived him: “As I’ve grown older, it takes longer and longer to get back to that ignition point. But working with Ronan, that spark came back. From beginning to end, it was pure joy to spend that time together.”
Anemone will be released on October 3.
