Acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis is back on the big screen in a family project this month – and has now addressed his previous comments where he announced his retirement from acting
Daniel Day-Lewis never intended to retire from acting and described the former comments he made about stepping away from performing as “grandiose gibberish”.
The Oscar winner, 68, is considered to be one of the greatest talents of his generation with movies including My Left Foot, Gangs Of New York, and There Will Be Blood. Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, Day-Lewis said: “I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure.
“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. I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while.”
The Oscar winner announced after the release of Phantom Thread in 2017 that he would be stepping away from the profession.
A spokesperson for the star at the time said: “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor. He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years.”
But explaining further in the new interview, he added: “The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work. 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’s something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it.
“I was well acquainted with it. I understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually. And it was only really in the last experience [making Phantom Thread ] that I began to feel quite strongly that maybe there wouldn’t be that regeneration anymore. That I just probably should just keep away from it, because I didn’t have anything else to offer.”
Day-Lewis was talking to Rolling Stone to promote Anemone, the debut film from his son, Ronan Day-Lewis.
The movie is billed as an exploration of the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons.
The plot has been kept under wraps, and wasn’t made entirely clear by its first trailer, which introduces Daniel Day-Lewis as Ray Stoker, a man wrestling with his past out in a rainy and isolated, wooded location.
Anemone is Day-Lewis’s first film since 2017’s Phantom Thread.
“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, and I think it was really in the spirit of wanting to just keep that ball in the air that we thought, We’ll keep moving forward with this, whatever that means,” he said.
Ronan Day-Lewis directed from a script he wrote with Daniel Day-Lewis, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B producing. Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green, and Samantha Morton co-star.
* Anemone will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival before being released in the US on October 3, and in the UK on November 7.
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