Read This: Daniel Day-Lewis sits for first solo print interview in nearly a decade

Day-Lewis spoke with The New York Times about his "retirement" and working with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, on Anemone.

By Emma Keates | October 3, 2025 | 2:41pm

Photo: Daniel Day-Lewis (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for FLC)

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Read This: Daniel Day-Lewis sits for first solo print interview in nearly a decade

Back in 2017, Daniel Day-Lewis’ family and friends advised him against making “that daft [expletive] statement” announcing that he would no longer be working as an actor. He held to that promise for eight years, but recently returned to the screen in Anemone, a film he co-wrote with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. (It also serves as the younger Day-Lewis’ directorial debut.) That much-anticipated return also means Daniel Day-Lewis is doing press rounds for the first time in years, including a frank interview with The New York Times—his first solo print conversation in nearly a decade—in which he discussed his loved ones’ pushback to that infamous announcement.

“I was at a very low ebb,” he continued of that time, in which he’d just wrapped production on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. “Not because of the work that I’d just done, but because of those doubts about my capacity to be part of that public world, which seemed more vivid than ever. So I thought, ‘I need to make a statement to myself.’ I was really talking to myself: ‘Don’t do this again.'”

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While he said his appetite for the work itself “never went away,” it was his aversion to the “very unnatural process of being a public figure” that inspired his retreat. The actor gestures repeatedly towards his introversion throughout the interview, concluding that while he feels “immensely privileged to be allowed to do my work as an actor” and he “understand(s) the invisible contract you sign when you agree to do that work is that you are going to participate in the entirety of what that will involve,” he’s “never yet found a way of living with the public aspects of it.”

Still, he said, he’d “rather face up to that than deny myself the chance to work with my son.” Anemone premiered at the New York Film Festival and opens today, October 3, in limited theaters before expanding on October 10. “We’ll go through this part of the process together and we’ll do it with tremendous gratitude because I’m very, very glad that we were allowed this opportunity,” Day-Lewis continued. Fans should enjoy it while they can, because he knows that “in a few months’ time, I’ll be looking for my quiet place again” (and isn’t likely to do any interviews of this sort for a while). In the meantime, you can read the full interview, which also delves into the actor’s first day back on set and his brief stint as a cabinetmaker, at The New York Times.