Daniel Day-Lewis breaks silence on earlier retirement speculations

Daniel Day-Lewis denies ever retiring from acting as he returns to acting eight years later.

The three-time Oscar winner spoke to Rolling Stone on Wednesday about his return to acting to star in his son Roman’s new film, Anemone.

"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," Day-Lewis told the outlet.

“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,” he said. “But working with Ro, that furnace just lit up. And it was, from beginning to end, just pure joy to spend that time together with him.”

The first time Day-Lewis announced plans to retire was in 1997 after making The Boxer. He returned in 2002 for Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, a film that earned him his third Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Day-Lewis, who last appeared on the big screen in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2017 drama Phantom Thread, did admit to “certain reservations about being back in the public world again.”

But he explained that his son Ronan “made it pretty clear that he wasn’t going to do it if [his father] didn’t do it.”

The new movie was co-written by Day-Lewis and Rowan, drawing inspiration from their real-life father-son relationship. 

The 68-year-old actor confessed that he “had some residual sadness” during the eight-year hiatus from acting.

“Because I knew Ronan was going to go on to make films, and I was walking away from that,” he told the magazine. “I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do something together and find a way of maybe containing it, so that it didn’t necessarily have to be something that required all the paraphernalia of a big production.”

“It was just kind of a low-level fear, [an] anxiety about re-engaging with the business of filmmaking,” Day-Lewis said. “The work was always something I loved. I never, ever stopped loving the work.”

The Lincoln actor explained there are aspects of filmmaking that make him feel “hollowed out." However, he was “well acquainted with it” and “understood that it was all part of the process, and that there would be a regeneration eventually.”

The actor shares Ronan, 27, Gabriel-Kane, 29, and Cashel Blake, 22, with wife Rebecca Miller.