Daniel Day-Lewis ends 7-year retirement to act in his son’s film

Three-time Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis is set to appear in another feature film, seven years after he abruptly announced the end of his acting career.

The film, Anemone, will be directed by the actor’s son, Ronan Day-Lewis, from a script that the pair co-wrote together. Few details about the movie are available, other than it focusing on intergenerational family bonds, especially the dynamics between fathers, sons and brothers.

Daniel Day-Lewis, 67, will star in the film alongside veteran English actors Sean Bean and Samantha Morton. Over the weekend, Bean and Day-Lewis were spotted riding a motorcycle together on a street in Manchester, England, according to the Manchester Evening News.

In 2017, Day-Lewis was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in his last film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. In the same year, Day-Lewis, a celebrity who has long guarded his privacy, said in a brief statement that he would no longer work as an actor.

Ronan Day-Lewis, 26, is a painter and filmmaker. This will be his first feature film, according to a statement from Focus Features, which is making the film with production company Plan B.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his most recent best-actor Oscar for Lincoln, in 2013. His earlier wins were for 1989’s My Left Foot and 2007’s There Will Be Blood.

“We could not be more excited to partner with a brilliant visual artist in Ronan Day-Lewis on his first feature film alongside Daniel Day-Lewis as his creative collaborator,” Focus Features Chairman Peter Kujawski said, adding that the father-son duo “have written a truly exceptional script.”

This isn’t the first time Daniel Day-Lewis has ended a hiatus from film work. He has spoken about having a perennial desire to stop acting — and in the late 1990s, he took a break to become an apprentice to a renowned shoemaker in Italy. In 2017, he issued his retirement notice in hopes of it lasting.

“I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project,” he told W magazine in a rare interview about the decision. “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. It was something I had to do.”

But just when he thought he was out, he’s being pulled back in.