Back with new film, actor Daniel Day-Lewis says he should have ‘kept his mouth shut’ about retiring

English actor Daniel Day-Lewis has admitted he may have spoken too soon when he said eight years ago that he would retire.

Speaking to entertainment magazine Rolling Stone, the 68-year-old Oscar winner said he regrets his 2017 announcement.

“Looking back on it now, I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure. It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work.”

The article was published ahead of the New York Film Festival world premiere of Anemone, a psychological drama directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis, 27, and co-written by the pair. Daniel Day-Lewis also stars in the lead role.

The actor’s last film was Phantom Thread (2017), a romantic drama written and directed by American film-maker Paul Thomas Anderson. It was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actor for Day-Lewis, among others, at the 2018 Academy Awards.

Day-Lewis’ first acting hiatus happened between 1997 and 2000, during which he became an apprentice shoemaker in Italy. The second break began in 2017.

“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. 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. 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,” he said.

Also starring English actors Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, Anemone is set in Yorkshire in the late 1980s and explores complex family relationships. Day-Lewis plays Ray, a reclusive member of the Stoker family at the heart of the story.

The film opens in the United States in October.

Day-Lewis said he had reservations about acting again, but was persuaded to do so by his son, who told him that he would not make the film if his father were not in it.

“I never stopped loving the work. But there were aspects of the way of life that went with it that I’d never come to terms with. There’s something about that process that left me feeling hollowed out at the end of it, but there would be regeneration eventually,” he said.

“It was only really in making Phantom Thread that I began to feel quite strongly that maybe there wouldn’t be that regeneration any more, that I should just keep away from it, because I didn’t have anything else to offer.”