Acclaimed actor to appear in first film in 8 years after retiring

Daniel Day-Lewis has come out of retirement to star in his first film in eight years that was co-written and directed by his son, Ronan.

Day-Lewis, 68, will make his first screen appearance since retiring in 2017 when “Anemone” makes its debut.

The movie will be released nearly a year after it was first revealed in October 2024 that Day-Lewis would return to acting. “Anemone” will also mark his son’s directorial debut.

Day-Lewis told Rolling Stone that he decided to come out of retirement because he wanted a chance to work with his son.

“I had some residual sadness because I knew Ronan was going to go on to make films, and I was walking away from that,” the three-time Academy Award-winner said.

“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,” Day-Lewis told the outlet. “So we started off [with] the idea of these two fellas in a shed, basically. Then, as time went on, the two of us began to get really stifled.”

The idea for “Anemone” was born out of both Day-Lewis and his son’s desire to do something about “the role that silence plays in brotherhood.”

The father-son duo first talked about collaborating back in 2018, but it wasn’t until 2020 when they actually starting writing ideas down.

“We would go back and forth, and I had a Google Doc where we’d jot down fragments of ideas, fragments of scenes that we were talking about, aspects of who this person was,” Ronan Day-Lewis recalled to Rolling Stone.

“I remember, there was a moment for me when you started actually speaking these fragments of scenes as Ray,” he said while referring to his father’s character in the film. “It started to inform the world we were building. We wrote the first 10 pages pretty quickly.”

Daniel Day-Lewis said the screenplay for “Anemone” was “basically all improvised,” commenting on how easy it came together after he and his son let it form organically.

“We were improvising, and refining, refining, refining. Ronan would make amendments along the way,” he explained. “But we kept at it. It was astonishing one day when, when Ro sort of counted the pages and said …”

“We’ve got something close to 100 pages,” his son chimed in.

His father then replied with, “Now what!?”

“Anemone” follows Jem Stoker (played by Sean Bean) as he reconnects with his estranged brother Ray (played by Day-Lewis).

“Bonded by a mysterious, complicated past, the men share a fraught, if occasionally tender relationship — one that was forever altered by shattering events decades earlier,” the film’s description reads.

The film also stars Samantha Morton as Nessa Stoker and Samuel Bottomley as Brian Stoker.

“Anemone,” will premiere at the New York Film Festival later this month. It will be will be followed by a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on Oct. 3 before expanding to a wide release on Oct. 10.