Daniel Day-Lewis has revealed that he “never intended to retire,” eight years after he announced he was stepping back from acting.
The Oscar-winner announced that he was retiring following his 2017 movie Phantom Thread.
But now, the 68-year-old actor is starring in Anemone, a movie he co-wrote with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who has directed it.
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Released next month, the film, which also stars Samantha Morton and Sean Bean, “explores the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons,” according to production company Focus Features.
In an interview with Rolling Stone published on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), Day-Lewis senior reflected on his acting return.
“I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut,” 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.”
The pair revealed that they started writing the script in 2020.
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“I had some residual sadness because I knew Ronan was going to go on to make films, and I was walking away from that,” Day-Lewis said.
“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.”
As time went on, the question arose of whether or not he would consider acting in the film.
“When we had a script and we weren’t sure what the next steps were, there was some part of me that began to feel, you know, certain reservations about being back in the public world again,” he said.
He told his son he was free to do what he liked with the script, but then “Ro made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t do it.”
Day-Lewis explained his reservations, saying: “It was just kind of a low-level fear, (an) anxiety about re-engaging with the business of filmmaking.”
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He said that he’d always “loved” 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.”
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