Daniel Day-Lewis had done it all, it seemed: working through a wish-list of dream directors, inhabiting every role as if he were reborn as the character. He won three Best Actor Oscars, for My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Lincoln (2012), before announcing, around the time of 2017’s Phantom Thread, that he was leaving the profession behind. Now, though, he’s back with a new film, Anemone, directed by his son, Ronan, and co-written by them both.
“It was just a lovely gift that I was given,” says Day-Lewis, talking to Empire alongside Ronan in New York last month, for a major interview discussing Anemone. “Most particularly it being Ronan’s first film, and having been there every day with him from the beginning, that experience was unique and beautiful.” So much, in fact, that it seems to have reignited something in him. “The appetite always seems to emerge in relation to something that I’ve become fascinated with, and I believe that could very easily happen,” he says of acting again in the future. “I’m certainly not going to shy away from it.”
Such a return hadn’t been on the cards at all. In the years following Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis was enjoying family time and, among other things, embarked on some rather niche handiwork. He’d studied woodwork as a teenager, almost taking up a career as a cabinetmaker, and now, with his acting supposedly behind him, the man who in the late 1990s spent a year as an apprentice shoemaker in Florence found himself yet again pursuing craftsmanship. “I went back to school, in Boston,” he tells Empire. “I studied violin making. At a really extraordinary school which is not well known [North Bennett Street School]. It’s one of the great treasures in this country.”
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Also, naturally, he was enjoying quality family time. Ironically though, out of that he and Ronan cooked up Anemone, which follows a former British soldier (Day-Lewis’ Ray Stoker) who has estranged himself from his family — until his brother Jem (Sean Bean) comes to find him, that is. It’s not autobiographical, but as father and son wrote it, it became more personal than they’d expected. “[Those] aspects started to creep up on us. There was a certain point where we both realised that, and started to embrace it,” says Ronan, who also experienced his father becoming Ray as they worked on it. “It was a really interesting paradox,” he explains. “Where it was my dad, but then also Ray, superimposed over him.” A little time off goes a long way.