Daniel Day-Lewis Walks Back Retirement to Star in His Son’s Film, ‘Anemone’

Guess who’s back, back again? Seven years after announcing his retirement from acting, three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis is returning to the screen for Anemone, a feature film directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis.

Produced by Focus Features and Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, Anemone reportedly explores “the intricate relationships between fathers, sons, and brothers, and the dynamics of familial bonds.” Day-Lewis stars opposite Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, and Safia Oakley-Green. The 67-year-old is also involved with the project behind the scenes, having cowritten the screenplay with his 26-year-old son.

Day-Lewis talked a big game about ending his acting career in 2017, during his press tour for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. “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 in me, and that became a compulsion,” he told W magazine at the time. “It was something I had to do.” His publicist, Leslee Dart, confirmed the news in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” read the statement. “He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision, and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”

Thankfully, it seems he might have spoken too soon. Widely considered one of the greatest actors of his generation, Day-Lewis has won the most best-actor Oscars in Academy history, taking home the trophy for 1989’s My Left Foot, 2007’s There Will Be Blood, and 2012’s Lincoln. He’s been nominated for three more best-actor Oscars as well—for 2002’s Gangs of New York, 1993’s In the Name of the Father, and 2017’s Phantom Thread. Prior to his 2017 announcement, Day-Lewis had made other proclamations about retiring from acting, with the actor retreating from film in the late 1990s and entering “semi-retirement” in Florence, Italy, to focus on his other passions: woodworking and shoemaking.

In 1989, Day-Lewis walked out mid-show while he was playing Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, saying that he saw his father’s ghost. He subsequently quit the production and retired from stage acting. Years later, in an interview with Time magazine, the actor claimed that he was perhaps speaking more metaphorically: “I may have said a lot of things in the immediate aftermath and to some extent I probably saw my father’s ghost every night, because of course if you’re working in a play like Hamlet, you explore everything through your own experience.” In any case, he hasn’t done a stage production since.

Rather than follow in his father’s footsteps, Ronan Day-Lewis took a different artistic path. He is primarily a painter who has exhibited his works in New York. His first international solo exhibition debuts Wednesday in Hong Kong. The elder Day-Lewis has three sons: 29-year-old Gabriel-Kane, Ronan, and 22-year-old Cashel. So if Daniel Day-Lewis claims he is retiring again after this, know there are at least two other sons who may lure him back with screenplays of their own.