Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the greatest actors of all time, is back. And no, this isn’t a glitch in the Matrix or an early April Fool’s joke. It’s very real. The three-time Oscar winner, who gave us incredible performances in There Will Be Blood, My Left Foot, and Lincoln, is stepping back into acting eight years after he famously “retired” following Phantom Thread. But as he told Rolling Stone, retirement was never the plan. “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. I never meant to retire from anything,” Day-Lewis said.
So what exactly changed since 2017? Well, his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The actor explained that when Ronan decided to direct his first feature, Anemone, he wanted Daniel front and center. “Ro made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t do it. But we had a very happy time writing this story together,” Daniel said. For him, the project wasn’t about awards, prestige, or Hollywood spectacle. It was about family.
Anemone follows a recluse living in Northern England whose life gets disrupted when his estranged brother, played by Sean Bean, resurfaces. The film also stars Samantha Morton, Safia Oakley-Green, and Samuel Bottomley, and co-wrote by Daniel and Ronan Day-Lewis. It premieres at the New York Film Festival later this month before opening in U.S. cinemas on October 3, with a UK release on November 7.
Day-Lewis has a history with “retirements.” In the late ’90s, he left acting to become a cobbler in Italy, only to return for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. The 2017 announcement after Phantom Thread was supposed to be his final curtain call, yet he admits now that the declaration was premature. “Looking back on it now – I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure. It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about,” he said.
Even during his hiatus, he never stopped loving acting. “The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work,” he stated. What changed was the lifestyle, the process, and the intensity that left him “feeling hollowed out.” But collaborating with Ronan reignited that spark. “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.”
At 68, Day-Lewis is proving that even the most selective actors can find a way back into the craft when the right project calls. Even if Anemone is a carefully chosen reentry, smaller and more personal than anything Hollywood might expect from him.
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