Daniel Day-Lewis has said he never intended to retire from acting and described the former comments he made about stepping away from performing as “grandiose gibberish” in a new feature interview.
“I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” Day-Lewis told Rolling Stone when quizzed on his most recent retirement announcement in 2017. Day-Lewis also launched a failed retirement in 1997.
“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. 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.”
Day-Lewis was talking to Rolling Stone to promote Anemone, the debut feature from his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The film is billed as an exploration of the complex and profound ties that exist between brothers, fathers, and sons. Its plot has been kept under wraps, and wasn’t made entirely clear by its first trailer, which introduces Daniel Day-Lewis as Ray Stoker, a man wrestling with his past out in a rainy and isolated, wooded location. Anemone is Day-Lewis’s first film since 2017’s Phantom Thread.
The veteran actor said he had “certain reservations about being back in the public world again.”
“Ro made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if I didn’t do it. But we had a very happy time writing this story together, and I think it was really in the spirit of wanting to just keep that ball in the air that we thought, We’ll keep moving forward with this, whatever that means,” he said.
Anemone will play the New York and London Film Festivals. Focus will release the film limited on October 3rd before expanding on October 10th. Ronan Day-Lewis directed from a script, he wrote with Daniel Day-Lewis, with Brad Pitt’s Plan B producing. Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green, and Samantha Morton co-star.