Why Daniel Day-Lewis retired – and where he’s been

Years after quitting Hollywood for a quiet life in Wicklow, the great actor is returning to film. But is there still method to his madness?

Well, it had to happen. After years of scuttlebutt and speculation, Daniel Day-Lewis – a man widely, and probably rightly, regarded as the world’s greatest living actor, with three Best Actor Oscars to prove it – has reversed his decision to retire, which he ostentatiously announced in 2017 after making his final film to date, Paul Thomas Anderson’s excellent Phantom Thread. 
For anyone who has thrilled to his distinctive, fascinating performances over the years, this comes as both revelatory and welcome news – as well, perhaps, as not being wholly surprising. For an actor as wholly committed to his craft as Day-Lewis, the opportunity to return to the big screen may have been too tempting to abandon forever. 
Yet the decision to return to cinema with a new picture, Anemone, has come as a family affair. He is acting and co-scripting with his son Ronan, and the film has been announced as a picture which “explores the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds”. His co-stars include Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, and some early leaked shots from filming show Day-Lewis riding a motorcycle looking intense, with Bean holding onto him tightly, as well he might. 
Still, the unexpected news of Anemone brings seven years of speculation to an end as to what, exactly, Day-Lewis has been up to when he wasn’t acting. There have been long hiatuses throughout his filmmaking career – five years apiece between 1997’s The Boxer and 2002’s Gangs of New York and 2012’s Lincoln and 2017’s Phantom Thread – and, in the past couple of decades, Day-Lewis has come to resemble little less than a thespian Stanley Kubrick, taking a very long time between projects and only committing to the most painstaking and rewarding of work. Even his sole modern-day misfire Nine, Rob Marshall’s musical version of Fellini’s 8 ½, still has a typically committed and fascinating performance by him in the lead, as well as an opportunity to hear Day-Lewis sing – which he does rather well. 
Of course, Day-Lewis has become as famous for the intricate, even masochistic preparations that he puts into his work as for the actual performances themselves. In the case of Nine, this was relatively restrained: to play the demanding film director Guido Contini, he chain-smoked, as a filmmaker of the period would have done, and spoke Italian both on and off set and remained in character even when not filming, something that the film’s script supervisor tactfully described as “a really surreal experience”. 
But the stories of his going full Method are legion and have contributed to a sense of Day-Lewis as someone both fully committed to his craft and – whisper it – perhaps taking things too far. Whether it’s having himself interrogated by Special Branch officers and tortured by having cold water thrown over him (In The Name of the Father), remaining in a wheelchair for months in order to recreate the symptoms of cerebral palsy (My Left Foot) or living wild in the North Carolina woods for a month to better understand the life of an American Indian (Last of the Mohicans), he has gone further than any of his peers in the name of authenticity. For Lincoln, he both insisted on speak on and off-set in the president’s Kentucky twang and sent text messages to his co-star Sally Field which he signed off “Abe”. 
Undoubtedly this is what makes him such an electrifying and powerful presence on screen, but it’s also hard not to echo the immortal words of Laurence Olivier to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, when the latter showed up sweaty and dishevelled after running miles to get into the mindset of his character: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” 
Ironically enough, Day-Lewis and Olivier both appeared in the 1984 picture The Bounty, although they shared no scenes together. Yet while Olivier – Day-Lewis’s predecessor as Britain’s greatest actor – was a theatrical performer of the old school and the younger man excels in finding his characters from the inside, both share the belief that when they’re not working, they should essentially vanish from sight. Olivier was famously so nondescript when offstage that people who had seem him tearing up the stage at the Old Vic would fail to recognise him a few moments later when he strolled past them in the street wearing civilian clothes. 
And Day-Lewis, who divides his time between Wicklow and New York, remains a low-key presence when not fully committing to his craft. Recent paparazzi shots of him from last year in New York show him long-haired and heavily tattooed, dressed in the kind of questionable attire that a man in his mid-sixties should not normally be allowed to get away with; he was sporting a blue tracksuit, black baseball cap and blue trainers, the kind of attire that a particularly street-smart teenager might wear. 
However, Day-Lewis’s dress sense is less interesting to his millions of admirers than the hints dropped over the past few years as to when, rather than if, he would return to cinema. One of the interesting things about the actor is that, although he is hardly influencer-level ubiquitous, he has never shied away from interviews. Although he can be pretentious, he is never less than interesting. (He once commented, of his reputation as a recluse, “How can you be a recluse in a house full of children, even if you had the inclination to be, which I don’t.”)
After he announced his decision to retire after Phantom Thread, he suggested that he had taken that bold step because playing the couturier Reynolds Woodcock had left him with a deep sense of sadness. “I dread to use the overused word ‘artist,’ but there’s something of the responsibility of the artist that hung over me,” he said. “I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing. The work can seem vital. Irresistible, even. And if an audience believes it, that should be good enough for me. But, lately, it isn’t…I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project. All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”
It had, of course, been suggested that Day-Lewis had quit acting for good before, most famously when he became a cobbler in Florence, serving as apprentice to the master craftsman Stefano Bemer in the city. At the time, his representatives claimed that it was just something that the actor had been doing for a day out of curiosity. But when Day-Lewis gave interviews for Gangs of New York – the project that enticed him out of that particular career hiatus, for the chance to work with his Age of Innocence director Martin Scorsese again – he was candid about the fact that he’d abandoned acting for a year to make shoes. “Yeah, I’m handy,” he explained. “You give me a tool belt, I know what to do with it…it was something I felt immediately drawn towards and I discovered that my hands were good, that I could make things and I’ve always loved to do that.”
As a private man, Day-Lewis has largely avoided any scandal or discussion about his personal life. When he was younger, there were some notorious incidents, such as his walking offstage during a National Theatre production of Hamlet because he became so emotionally overwhelmed by playing the role that he imagined seeing the ghost of his father, Cecil Day-Lewis. He also received a torrent of negative press attention after purportedly ending his relationship with Isabelle Adjani via fax in 1995, while she was pregnant with his son Gabriel-Kane. 
Yet his marriage to Arthur Miller’s daughter, the novelist and filmmaker Rebecca, appears to have given him personal stability and happiness, as well as two more children, including Ronan. When living in Wicklow, he is occasionally seen having a quiet drink at his local pub, and he was an avid cinemagoer until his local screen closed down; in one interview he confessed to going to see the Twilight pictures, as his children were fans of the series. 
Day-Lewis has made occasional brief appearances at public events over the past seven years, including appearing at a National Board of Review gala in January this year to honour Scorsese, at which he praised “the supreme, inimitable artistry of this man” and called him “a living treasure as a man and as a filmmaker I love and revere”. Scorsese cheekily said in his acceptance speech for his Best Director award: “We did two films together and it’s one of the greatest experiences of my life, I must say. Maybe there’s time for one more. Maybe! He’s the best.”
There are three directors who have particular significance in Day-Lewis’s career, all of whom he has collaborated with more than once: Scorsese, Anderson and Jim Sheridan. The latter offered a rare insight into Day-Lewis’s private thoughts and opinions earlier this year. After the actor was photographed meeting with him and his Lincoln director Steven Spielberg in January this year, gossip understandably turned to the possibility of a Day-Lewis screen return. 
But Sheridan confirmed that Day-Lewis’s participation in talks about a drama about the Kennedy patriarch Joseph would be limited to his being an executive producer. (A shame, incidentally: if he went full There Will Be Blood, the results would be magnificent.) Sheridan later clarified: “He says he’s done. I keep talking to him. I’d love to do something with him again. He’s like everybody else. He opens up the streamers and there’s seven thousand choices, none of them good…it’d be great to see Daniel coming back and doing something else because he’s so good.” 
This was echoed by Anderson, who said in 2021, when asked about a potential Day-Lewis return, “Wouldn’t it be great? I’m greedy like everybody else. I want more Daniel Day-Lewis performances. But I also think he’s given us more than enough, and we should stop being so greedy. He’s the king.” 
Anemone is, at least, proof that this particular king is not dead. It remains uncertain as to whether Day-Lewis will act for Anderson, Scorsese, Spielberg and the rest again. But we can only hope that his return to the screen has whetted his almost blunted purpose, and that, greedily, we can hope for more indelible – and intricately prepared for – roles in the future. 
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