Daniel Day-Lewis opened up about ending his eight-year hiatus from acting and clarified that he “never truly meant” to retire.
The three-time Oscar winner, 68, announced he would no longer work in Hollywood after starring in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread. In September 2024, however, the veteran actor said that he was returning to the screen in Anemone, the feature directorial debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis.
Back in 1997, shortly after finishing work on Jim Sheridan’s The Boxer, he had famously moved to Florence to apprentice as a shoemaker under Italian craftsman Stefano Bemer. He kept largely out of public view for five years before returning for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
In an interview ahead of the world premiere of Anemone at the New York Film Festival, Day-Lewis said he regretted how definitive his retirement statement sounded.
“Looking back on it now – I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” he told Rolling Stone. “It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work.”
“Apparently, I've been accused of retiring twice now,” he continued. “I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while.”
Anemone, which Day-Lewis wrote with his son, explores “fraught” relationships between fathers and sons and between brothers with a “mysterious, complicated past”.
The movie stars Sean Bean as Jem, a middle-aged man who sets out from his suburban home on a journey into the woods where he reconnects with his estranged hermit brother Ray, played by Day-Lewis.
Samantha Morton, How to Have Sex actor Samuel Bottomley, and Safia Oakley-Green, known for her role in the horror film Out of Darkness, feature in supporting roles.
Day-Lewis and his son began talking about working together “just before Covid”, and went back and forth working on the characters of Jem and Ray.
Day-Lewis described feeling a “residual sadness” during his time away from acting, knowing his son would continue working on this screenplay and more down the line. He believed he was “walking away from that”.
In June 2017, a spokesperson for Day-Lewis announced that he would “no longer be working as an actor”.
“He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years,” the statement read.
“This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”
In the new interview, Day-Lewis said that while he never lost his love for acting, he had misgivings about the “business of filmmaking”.
“It was just kind of a low-level fear, anxiety about re-engaging with the business of filmmaking. The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work,” he said.
“But there were aspects of the way of life that went with it that I’d never come to terms with – from the day I started out to today. There is something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it. I mean, I was well acquainted with it. I understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually.”
Day-Lewis, famous for his method acting, said that it was while filming Phantom Thread that he began to question if he could handle the committed process he put himself through for every role.
“And it was only really in the last experience that I began to feel quite strongly that maybe there wouldn’t be that regeneration anymore,” he said, referring to the 2017 movie. “That I just probably should just keep away from it, because I didn’t have anything else to offer.”
Day-Lewis said working on Anemone with his son reinvigorated him. “As I get older, it just takes me longer and longer to find my way back to the place where the furnace is burning again. But working with Ro, that furnace just lit up. And it was, from beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him.”
Anemone releases in theaters on 3 October.
