Daniel Day-Lewis is known for his roles in Gangs of New York, The Last of the Mohicans, and Lincoln. The actor announced in 2017 that he was retiring from acting after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. In late August 2025, he surprised fans with the announcement that he would star in Anemone, his son Ronan Day-Lewis’s directorial debut.
While this isn’t the first time Lewis has returned to acting after taking a hiatus, he admits that, amid his decision to star in his son’s movie, he should have never made the public announcement back in 2017.
“But looking back on it now — I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” he said in an interview with Variety.
“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. I never, you know… 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. … As I get older, it just takes me longer and longer to find my way back to the place where the furnace is burning again.”
Lewis said he felt some “residual sadness” when his son announced he would be breaking into the film industry with his first directorial project. The actor thought that he was walking away from an opportunity to work with his son if he stayed retired. While deciding to either help write the movie role and pass it on to someone else, his son made it clear that there would be no movie without him.
Re-engaging in the world of filmmaking did leave the actor with “low-level fear” and “anxiety.” Lewis explained that he started to feel hollow about the process of acting, and after Phantom Thread, he realized that the “regeneration” quality was fizzling away.
“The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work. But there were aspects of the way of life that went with it that I’d never come to terms with — from the day I started out to today,” he said.
Anemone will open in select theaters on October 3 before a nationwide expansion on October 10.
