Daniel Day-Lewis said he should have “kept [his] mouth shut” about retiring from acting, calling his earlier public pronouncements “grandiose gibberish” in a new interview with Rolling Stone.
The three-time Oscar winner, who announced his retirement in 2017 after what many believed would be a final performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, told the magazine that he never intended to stop acting altogether. “I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure.”
Day-Lewis told Rolling Stone that the decision to step away was driven less by a loss of love for acting than by fatigue with the lifestyle that accompanied his career. He described a pattern in his work in which intense emotional investment in a role was followed by a period of regeneration. On Phantom Thread, he said, he felt that regeneration might no longer come. “There’s something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it,” he said. “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.”
Contrary to the perception created by his 2017 announcement, Day-Lewis said he never stopped loving acting. He recently reversed course and accepted a lead role in Anemone, a psychological drama written and directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, which the actor co-wrote. The film centers on an English veteran, played by Sean Bean, who reunites with his brother, portrayed by Day-Lewis, after the brother has lived in the woods in isolation for 20 years. A trailer for Anemone has drawn attention for its tense tone and the actor’s return to the screen.
Asked about the public reaction to his earlier retirement declaration, Day-Lewis kept a self-deprecating tone. “Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now,” he told Rolling Stone. “I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while.”
Day-Lewis’s career has been marked by long gaps between roles and a reputation for intense preparation; he has won Academy Awards for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln. His 2017 announcement prompted widespread surprise among fans and critics, who regarded Phantom Thread as the actor’s farewell performance. The decision to re-emerge for a project written by his son adds a familial dimension to the comeback and offers an explanation for the timing: a different kind of work that drew him back.
The Rolling Stone conversation underscores the distinction Day-Lewis drew between the act of performing and the demands of the actor’s life. He framed his departure as a pause to pursue other forms of creative work and said his return was motivated by an artistic opportunity rather than a reversal of a definitive retirement. As details about Anemone’s release schedule and further production information become available, attention on the actor’s next steps is likely to grow among cinephiles who have followed his selective career for decades.