After more than three decades in the movie industry, three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis
has decided to hang up his hat.
"Mr. Daniel?"
"I'm finished."
The actor announced that his 2017 film with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, a '50s-set
dress designer drama titled Phantom Thread, will be the last installment in his esteemed
filmography.
The statement, given via his spokeswoman, read,
"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."
The notoriously private thespian may not be willing to elaborate publicly, but he has
plenty of reasons to leave Hollywood's bright lights behind.
The toll of being a method actor
It's no secret that Daniel Day-Lewis takes a very unique approach to his craft.
Not only is he exceedingly choosy about which roles he'll accept, but he's also known to
disappear into them throughout the production process.
"I follow my curiosity and it takes me into all kinds of strange places."
He stayed in a wheelchair and was spoon-fed by crewmembers to fully experience having
cerebral palsy for his Oscar-winning turn in My Left Foot; he spent six months in the
wild to prepare for his role in The Last of the Mohicans; he isolated himself from the
cast and crew during the production on The Ballad of Jack and Rose; he tattooed his hands
and trained for 18 months as a fighter for The Boxer.
The results speak for themselves, but all that dramatic heavy lifting takes a toll.
"Part of my job is to be drained."
"I wore myself out."
Post-production depression
Not only is the work itself grueling, but once he's done with a role, he has to deal
with the emotional repercussions of letting it go.
As he told The Telegraph, "There's a terrible sadness.
The last day of shooting is surreal.
Your mind, your body, your spirit are not prepared to accept that this experience is
coming to an end.
You've devoted so much of your time to unleashing, in an unconscious way, some sort of spiritual
turmoil."
He also has trouble letting go of his characters as a result.
"You're not quite sure what to do with yourself when it's finished."
"It's very hard to conceive of any kind of life after it.
Of course there is one waiting."]
For example, after finishing Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis admitted to speaking with
his Butcher dialect for months after the film's completion and felt a sense of alienation
during the film's debut, telling Rolling Stone,
"I got nervous before the premiere.
I knew I'd also feel a sense of sadness.
Now I have to accept that the film is complete and no longer has anything to do with me."
Secondary career paths
He was showered with decades of praise for his work in front of the camera, but Day-Lewis
ultimately sought a different level of fulfillment in his side career as a cobbler.
After shooting The Boxer, he started a family with his wife Rebecca Miller, and apprenticed
in Italy with master shoemaker Stefano Bemer.
He told Rolling Stone, "It's an antidote to this other thing I do."
"Most particularly, perhaps, because you see this visible evidence, you have this tangible
thing at the end, and if you f*** up, you can see it very clearly and do it again.
It's not a matter of opinion.
It's either good or it's bad."
Making shoes might seem like a strange passion for an Oscar winner, but as we've seen countless
times, it can be hard for a celebrity to stay grounded in the spotlight.
Working with one's hands to produce work you can point to at the end of the day seems like
a great way to stay centered.
Allergic to fame
Even at the peak of his career, Day-Lewis retreated from the public eye for years between
projects to spend time on his family farm in Ireland, where he's often spotted visiting
the pubs to have a pint—alone.
Unlike a number of his more outgoing colleagues, he's rejected the notion that he's a public
figure at all times.
He told The BBC,
"I am, whether I like it or not, a public figure during certain periods.
Then I disappear, it seems."
"Of course in my experience I don't disappear, I'm just doing other things.
What I'm doing is re-engaging with life."
At this point, given his merit as an actor, any movie starring Day-Lewis earns special
attention—which undermines his interests in making movies in the first place.
As he told The Telegraph,
"The work itself is never anything but pure pleasure, but there's an awful lot of peripheral
stuff that I find it hard to be surrounded by.
I like things to be swift, because the energy you have is concentrated and can be fleeting.
The great machinery of film can work against that."
In today's Hollywood, that machinery seems larger and louder than ever—and it's left
less room for the quieter sorts of character studies that Day-Lewis tends to favor.
Instead, studios are looking for properties with proven brand value, which means lots
of sequels, reboots, remakes, and cinematic universes.
To an actor who built his career on taking emotional and physical risks, it may no longer
be worth working within those constraints.
"Oh, oh oh, well in that case…"
Going out on top
When Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar for Lincoln in 2012, he made Academy Awards history
by becoming the only actor to win three trophies in that category.
Once you've set such a high bar for yourself, there's really nowhere else to go but down,
and Day-Lewis seems to know that his status as a legend is well worth protecting.
"I have a competition in me.
I want no one else to succeed."
And while this time seems like the real deal, Daniel Day-Lewis has walked away from acting
before—more than once, in fact.
He left a stage production of Hamlet in the middle of a show because he thought he was
interacting with the ghost of his dead father.
He took five years off after The Boxer, and planned a five-year sabbatical from acting
after Lincoln.
He told The Guardian, "I just wanted some time away from it all.
I need that quite often … I have quite a strong feeling about when I should work and
when I shouldn't."
Evidently, Day-Lewis is still going with his gut—and walking away from the spotlight
at last.
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