Reports of Daniel Day-Lewis’ retirement were greatly exaggerated, but the Oscar winner knows it’s partly his own fault. “Looking back on it now—I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” the Lincoln star recently told Rolling Stone of his widely-shared 2017 announcement. “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,” he continued. In fairness, the actor’s statement, released by a representative after his turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, never explicitly used the word “retire.” It did seem pretty damn definitive, though—at least at the time. “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” it read. “He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”
Day-Lewis might want to figure out a slightly more subtle way to make a career pivot the next time he has the urge to try something new. “Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now. I never meant to retire from anything!” he said. “I just wanted to work on something else for a while.” In 1997, it was cobbling, per The Guardian. Between completing The Boxer that year and starring in Gangs Of New York five years later, the true multi-hyphenate spent time working as an apprentice to Italian shoemaker Stefano Bemer. In 1989, he also walked out of a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre mid-performance, which posed a slight problem as he was the one playing the titular Dane. He hasn’t returned to stage acting since.
Even with all these dramatic exits—whether he intended them to be as dramatic as they appeared or not—the actor says he “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,” he explained to RS. “There’s something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of 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.”
Luckily, eight years away—and the prospect of collaborating with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis—gave him the regeneration he needed. The two co-wrote the screenplay for Anemone, which marks the younger Day-Lewis’ directorial debut. “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,” the actor continued. “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 premieres this month at the New York Film Festival. Hopefully it won’t be another eight years until Day-Lewis’ furnace gets lit again.
