Eight years after he announced his retirement, Daniel Day-Lewis is back acting in Anemone, which was directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis.
While speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of Anemone’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival, Day-Lewis admitted he regretted announcing his retirement in 2017. “Looking back on it now — I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” he said. “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.”
Day-Lewis first took an extended break from acting in 1997 to become a shoemaker in Italy, while he picked up acting again in 2002 to star in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. His second major acting break was announced following his role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread.
“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. … 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,” he said. “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.”
Day-Lewis also admitted he had “some residual sadness” over knowing his son “was going to go on to make films” while he was “walking away from that.”
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do something together and find a way of maybe containing it, so that it didn’t necessarily have to be something that required all the paraphernalia of a big production?’” he said.
Anemone follows follows a middle-aged man (Sean Bean) on his journey into the woods where he reconnects with his estranged hermit brother (Day-Lewis).
While Day-Lewis had “certain reservations about being back in the public world again” by starring in Anemone, he said his son “made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t do it.”
“It was just kind of a low-level fear, [an] anxiety about re-engaging with the business of filmmaking,” Day-Lewis said of the nerves he felt amid his return to acting. “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 mean, I was well acquainted with it. I understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually.”
He continued, “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.”
Anemone will open in select theaters on Oct. 3, followed by a nationwide expansion on Oct. 10 from Focus Features.
