Daniel Day-Lewis knows you’ve got questions. Who wouldn’t?
A three-time Oscar winner who has delivered striking, fully committed performances in films like “There Will Be Blood,” “Lincoln” and “My Left Foot,” Day-Lewis is often hailed as the world’s greatest living actor. Still, he has long wrestled with complicated feelings about his career and the public duties that come with it.
Prone to taking yearslong hiatuses between roles, Day-Lewis issued an unusual statement in 2017, after filming “Phantom Thread,” to announce that he would no longer work as an actor at all. Could he be enticed back under the right circumstances, as happened once before when he came out of semiretirement to film Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” (2002)? Or was this truly the end of a legendary cinematic career?
In the years since, people have only grown more curious about the circumstances of his long withdrawal. Even Day-Lewis, who continued to stay out of the public eye, could feel that accruing interest.
“People tend to talk in a rather hyperbolic way: The more elusive you may seem to be, the harder they’re going to come after you,” he told me on a video call last week.
We had met to discuss the new drama “Anemone,” which has put an end to his retirement — at least for now. In theaters Friday, it marks the feature directorial debut of Day-Lewis’s son Ronan and stars the 68-year-old actor as Ray, a taciturn former soldier who lives a life of self-imposed solitude in the woods of northern England. After years off the grid, he is tracked down by his brother, Jem (Sean Bean), who hopes to bring Ray home to face the troubled son he left behind. But before that can happen, the brothers must confront the long-buried traumas that still haunt them.
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The post Daniel Day-Lewis Gets Candid About His Return From Retirement appeared first on New York Times.
