Good news for those on Daniel Day-Lewis retirement watch.
The acting legend emerged on screen for the first time in eight years to star in his son’s directorial debut, Anemone, a dark, brooding tale of two estranged brothers with a painful past. The film, also starring Sean Bean, hits theaters this weekend, but its director, Ronan Day-Lewis, says he and his dad are already thinking about the future — and it’s looking uncharacteristically funny.
“We both would love to do something else together if we find the right thing that we can both really get obsessed with in the same way that we did with this,” the younger Day-Lewis tells Entertainment Weekly.
“We’ve talked about wanting to do something that explores humor more, actually,” he adds. “I don’t know about a comedy, but something really different tonally to Anemone.”
And not just Anemone. Known for his intense, transformative dramatic roles like Bill “the Butcher” Cutting, Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, and Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis doesn’t often show his funny side. The satire My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and comedy Stars and Bars (1988) are two rare exceptions.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis in ‘Anemone’
No matter the genre, fans of the three-time Oscar winner will be thrilled that the actor is even considering returning to the screen. After 2017’s Phantom Thread, which reunited him with There Will Be Blood filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, Day-Lewis announced his retirement in a statement via his representative that same year. He has since backtracked, recently telling Rolling Stone, “I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while.”
Still, it took a project co-written with his own son to finally bring him back to the big screen. Ronan, a first-time filmmaker, had been writing the script for Anemone with Day-Lewis for years, and “always knew” that his father would play the lead role of Ray, a reclusive veteran hiding a dark secret.
“In a way, I guess it felt like a hurdle, but it was less me trying to get him out of retirement; it was more like, I think we had the desire to try to do something together, but we didn’t know if it would ever materialize into a full script that we were both excited enough about to really pursue. And up until very late in the writing process, he had so much ambivalence about coming back and doing it.”
As exciting as it was for Ronan to land arguably the greatest living actor for his debut film, the 27-year-old admits he also felt pressure to direct a movie worthy of his father’s legacy.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean in ‘Anemone’
“A hundred percent,” he says when asked if he felt that responsibility. “I mean, I was terrified at first for so many different reasons. I thought that if I did get to make a film, my feature debut would not be in such close association with him. There’s a lot of baggage obviously with that in terms of how I anticipated the project being looked at, and also the rightful expectations anyone has of a film that he’s involved in.”
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He adds, “So, it’s a lot of pressure for a first film. That definitely gave me pause, but then I was imagining looking back on this in 10 years, and if I didn’t take this chance to collaborate with him in this way, it would’ve really haunted me. The script, at a certain point, gave us no choice but to pursue it.”
See what is hopefully the first of many father-son collaborations in theaters on Friday.
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