Is Day-Lewis retirement just an extended retreat?

Don’t be too surprised if, like Cagney, he makes a brilliant comeback, writes Ann Hornaday

I’ VE met Daniel Day-Lewis only once — during a press junket for Gangs of New York. I sat next to him at a roundtable interview during which my colleagues peppered him with questions about his portrayal of Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s portrait of mid-19th century Manhattan.

As the Q&A ended, I whispered that the last time I’d seen him was 15 years earlier, when he played the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the play Futurists at the Royal National Theatre on London’s South Bank.

“You saw that?” Day-Lewis asked, astonished. Saw it? I swear I felt some of Day-Lewis’s spit on my forehead that night, a fact I shared with him at the Gangs junket — which made his hooded eyes give way to a huge smile.

But now, to quote his character in There Will Be Blood, he’s finished. Earlier this week, Day-Lewis issued a statement that he has decided to stop acting, providing no details about what led to his decision or what he might be pursuing in the future.

The response has run the gamut between rank speculation and elegiac mourning. But not, necessarily, surprise. Now 60, Day-Lewis has been notorious for his approach-avoidance relationship with the craft he so thoroughly mastered, taking long stretches of time between movies to enjoy his adopted home here in Ireland or learning to cobble shoes in Italy. During a theatrical production of Hamlet, he reportedly saw the ghost of his late father and swore off the stage for good; he’s known for adamantly refusing to break character on movie sets, demanding that co-workers address him by his fictional names, his method blurring into its own form of brilliant madness.

Those eccentricities have been dismissed as showy and self-indulgent, but few would argue that they haven’t resulted in some of the most indelible characterisations of the past 30 years, with Day-Lewis exemplifying screen performance at its most fully inhabited and uncompromising. How could audiences be immersed in the emotional life he was conjuring on screen if he didn’t dare take the plunge himself, without reservation or self-protection? For some, talent is a renewable resource; for others, it’s subject to depletion: Stripping oneself down to build up another persona has to be physically and psychically exhausting, exacting a price that eventually can’t be recouped by retreating into what Montaigne called the “back shop” of solitude and self-renewal. Those long retreats from the profession point out how anachronistic Day-Lewis’s career seems a generation later than he began it: At a time when the prevailing business model for actors is to latch on to a comic-book movie to finance one’s passion projects, when a star such as George Clooney can make a cool billion selling his tequila business, Day-Lewis has resisted the paradigm of superheroes and side hustles.

There’s something in the fact that two Sirs — Anthony Hopkins and Patrick Stewart can today be seen in the new Transformers sequel and The Emoji Movie, respectively. Meanwhile, Day-Lewis has been almost perversely choosy, racking up a modest 20 movies over the course of a 35-year career, with nary a robot car or poop icon among them. If Day-Lewis’s retirement is indeed permanent, his final movie will be a more edifying affair: Phantom Thread, a 1950s-era drama set in the fashion world, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, of There Will Be Blood.

Then, presumably, the finest film actor of his generation will embark on the longest retreat of all.

Those mourning Day-Lewis’s imminent disappearance from the movies do well to remember James Cagney’s quieter but no less resolute decision to quit acting in 1961. Twenty years later, before Cagney would make one of the most brilliant comebacks in Hollywood history, Milos Forman approached him with his adaptation of Ragtime, hoping to coax him back to the screen. “No. I’m retired,” Cagney is said to have replied. Then, after a few moments went by, came the instinctive question that defines all actors at their core: “What’s the part?”