Daniel Day-Lewis, pulled out of retirement by his son, finds his acting fire still burns

It’s been eight years since Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from acting and said he wanted to “explore the world in a different way.”

But the big-screen absence of the actor many would peg as the greatest one alive ends with “Anemone,” a new film directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. The two of them wrote it together. What began as something small, with no real ambition, grew until a full feature film and Day-Lewis’ long-awaited return to movies.

“It saddened me that I had perhaps ruled myself out of that when I decided to work on something else for a while,” Day-Lewis said in an interview alongside his son. “As we progressed through it, and it seemed less and less possible to contain it, like two fellas in a shed, it began to alarm me slightly. I understood that this was going to involve the full paraphernalia of a film production, and that wasn’t something I was eager to get back into.”

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“But we just kept moving forward to see what would happen,” he added. “And this is what happened.”

“Anemone,” which recently premiered at the New York Film Festival and which Focus Features releases Friday in theaters, finds Day-Lewis, now 68, not even slightly less intense or magnetic a performer. It’s a father-son story, though not an autobiographical one. Day-Lewis stars as Ray Stoker, a solitary hermit living in a remote cabin. His brother, Jem (Sean Bean), arrives and tries to convince him to return to his teenage son.

Since 2017’s “Phantom Thread,” Day-Lewis has, among other things, studied violin making in Boston. But he has also come to think of his declaration of retirement as a mistake, or not quite what he intended. At least, it wasn’t enough to stand in the way of him making a movie with his son.

“I know it’s been imagined on my behalf by numerous commentators, people that don’t know me, that somehow the way I work has left me so debilitated I can barely open my eyes in the morning. This then requires a period of five or six years recovery!” Day-Lewis says. “That was never the case. The work itself was always nourishing to me.”

Yet after making “Phantom Thread,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s London-set portrait of a perfectionist couturier, Day-Lewis was uncertain that he would ever regenerate the appetite to tackle another role.

“I definitely was brought low after I finished shooting “Phantom Thread” more than for any other reason because I anticipated being back in the public arena again,” he says. “And this is where I find myself now. And it’s something I never found a solution to from the day I started doing this work until now. The public aspect of my life I’ve always been baffled by.”

The spotlight and a ‘stark reminder’

The most meaningful gesture Day-Lewis is offering his son might not be making a movie with him, but returning to the spotlight for it. At the New York Film Festival, Day-Lewis has been a happy, humble presence, calling himself a fool for his professed retirement and dutifully accepting a glare of attention that he’s largely avoided for the last decade.

“It’s been a stark reminder for me of: Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s like,” he said, chuckling.

But Day-Lewis greeted a reporter warmly, urging him to pull a chair — a Churchill, noted Day-Lewis, a craftsman and furniture maker — and spoke candidly and thoughtfully about the mystique that has often surrounded his work, an aura he disdains.