In 2017, Daniel Day-Lewis shocked the entertainment world when he announced his retirement following the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread because of a “very low ebb” and doubts about managing a life in the public eye. His goal was to create a personal boundary—although friends and family had advised against making such a formal proclamation. While this was a shock to many, this was not her first time retiring. In 2012, he took a five-year hiatus after Lincoln, and before that, a break in the late 1990s to train as a shoemaker in Italy, returning in 2002 to star in Gangs of New York.
In retrospect, Day-Lewis was exhausted from the physical and emotional intensity of his acting roles and his quest for a private life. But after eight years away, Day-Lewis had to return, not for himself but for his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who wanted to direct his father in Anemone. The project was deeply personal: he co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan that allowed for creativity and family connection. In Anemone, he plays a reclusive depressed ex-soldier who must decide to reunite with his son after an emergency. Sean Bean plays his brother, who desperately persuades him to return and allow himself and his family to heal.
In a press conference at the NYFF, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis, and Sean Bean discuss the power of Anemone, the decision to come back to acting, his personal journey, and building a bond with Bean.
“It’s coming back to the work that I love,” declared Day-Lewis. I felt that I had a vocation at a very early age as a child still that was going to be my future one way or another for better or worse, and I hoped that I would remain working for some time. I have taken time away from it. Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now, but it would never occur to me to use the word “retirement” because sometimes I have stopped working in this work because I wished to do some other period of time, and after the last one, I was in very low spirits. I made a fool of myself by announcing that I was going to stop working and probably a bigger fool of myself coming back. But to deny myself the possibility of working with Ronan, I just stand on my pride. I think that would have been probably a worse decision.”
“I have in common with a lot of actors that I’m very ill-suited for the life around it, the public aspect of it. It’s a paradox. We seem to be begging for attention just by the fact we’re doing that work. But it never really occurs to you that you can’t switch that attention off. You’re lucky enough to get it, and there’s nothing to moan about because it means you’ve been lucky. I’m grateful for a chance to talk about it a bit because I realize it raised questions. You’re meant to just crawl away and die quietly. It just seems so self-important to me. But in that case, I was at the very low end. And I thought, I’m doing this because I don’t really expect to find my way back to the appetite for this work again. And I did. And I’m really grateful for it. I hope I do again,” Day-Lewis finished.
“I had for years this kind of vague sense of wanting to write something about brotherhood and find a way into that kind of archetype. At first, I thought maybe it could be a coming-of-age type story or something like that. Then at one point after my dad had stopped acting for the time being, he said to me that he wanted to find something that we could work on together; it turned out that he had independently had this inclination to do something about brotherhood. So that was really the scene for us, and we kind of followed that,” Ronan stated.
“I just wanted to work with Ronan; the years since, we made things together of different kinds, and I regressively thought that you were going to make films and we would have had that experience together,” said Day-Lewis. “But when we set about it, I’d imagine that somehow, we’d keep it contained in such a way that it would be a sort of very private experience, but the trouble is every stroke of the pen, if you free yourself during that part of the process, then you make it less and less possible to keep it that way. Initially it’s just two fathers in a shed. At a certain point, we got really sick of being in that shed; we had to get out of the shed. We needed Nessa, and then we became focused more on Nessa and other parts of the story.”
“I have two brothers, and I think there’s this sort of beauty and tragedy to brotherhood, that kind of volatility where things can veer between love and rage in a matter of seconds. I was really fascinated with that. I think we both were really interested in the sense of silence and just how siblings have this almost like telepathic communication with each other and how many different silences can exist between brothers, between siblings,” said Ronan.
For Bean, joining the cast was an honor and a very hands-on experience. “I loved it. As soon as I read it, Daniel called me and couldn’t believe it was calling me. We’ve talked before; I did a job called Time Script, a television series, and he was kind enough to bring me and Steven Gr. when we both started. I was quite gobsmacked by that, to tell you the truth. I was even more gobsmacked and surprised when he called me and told me about this wonderful script that he and Ronan had written. I was very flattered and honored. After reading the script and seeing its content, its potential, and its just this—the beauty of the poignancy and these incredibly fractured and mysterious characters. I was just blown away by it, and it was something I wanted. I was so much looking forward to working with these guys.”
To learn more about Anemone, check out the full interview in the video above.
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