Why Daniel Day-Lewis quit
The British actor’s latest film was so difficult he’s hanging up his boots, writes Stephanie Merry.
Daniel Day-Lewis has played a few monsters during his career. Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood isn’t someone you’d want to spend much time with, but he was a kitten compared to the homicidal Bill ‘‘the Butcher’’ Cutting from Gangs of New York.
As difficult as those characters were to play, though, they weren’t the ones to send the three-time Oscar winner fleeing from his profession. That would be his latest role as fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
‘‘Before making the film, I didn’t know I was going to stop acting,’’ he said during an interview with W Magazine. ‘‘I do know that Paul and I laughed a lot before we made the movie. And then we stopped laughing because we were both overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. That took us by surprise. We didn’t realise what we had given birth to. It was hard to live with. And still is.’’
Last year, Day-Lewis’ publicist released a statement that was light on specifics but revealed that Phantom Thread would be his final film. ‘‘This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject,’’ it read.
Now Day-Lewis is giving us a few more details. He apparently flirted with the idea of quitting for a long time. That’s partly why he took so many lengthy breaks between making movies. But ultimately another director or project would reel him back in for another round of method acting brilliance.
Day-Lewis is famously private, so releasing a statement felt like an unusual move, but he had his motivations. ‘‘I did want to draw a line,’’ he said. ‘‘I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project. All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.’’
Phantom Thread is a strange, engrossing film; it’s also not as disturbing as some of the actor’s others. The protagonist is a pernickety eternal bachelor who creates gorgeous gowns for British high society just after World War II. Part of his process is finding – and eventually discarding – various muses. But when he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), their relationship seems different.
Day-Lewis has no intention of watching the movie, though he’s seen many of his others. ‘‘Not wanting to see the film is connected to the decision I’ve made to stop working as an actor,’’ he said. ‘‘But it’s not why the sadness came to stay. That happened during the telling of the story, and I don’t really know why.’’
Other A-listers have similarly announced imminent retirements only to change course. Steven Soderbergh famously claimed he was done directing movies in 2013, though his latest film Logan Lucky came out last year. In 2009, Alec Baldwin told Men’s Journal that ‘‘movies are part of my past’’ even though they were still a large part of his future.
And yet, Day-Lewis doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would waffle. He has plenty of other interests, including woodworking and painting. He has also, apparently, dabbled in writing scripts with his writer-director wife Rebecca Miller.
But he still doesn’t seem to be quite over the difficult experience of making Phantom Thread nor the decision to walk away from the only career he’s known. ‘‘I have great sadness,’’ he said. ‘‘And that’s the right way to feel. How strange would it be if this was just a gleeful step into a brand-new life. I’ve been interested in acting since I was 12, and back then, everything other than the theatre was cast in shadow. When I began, it was a question of salvation. Now, I want to explore the world in a different way.’’
–Washington Post