Daniel Day-Lewis will make his big screen comeback in October 2025 after an eight-year retirement from acting.
The three-time Academy Award winner, 68, signed on to star opposite Sean Bean and Samantha Morton in the upcoming drama Anemone — which he cowrote with his son, writer-director Ronan Day-Lewis. The mysterious project marks Daniel’s first on-screen role since 2017’s Phantom Thread.
Daniel — known for award-winning performances in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln — shocked the world on the eve of Phantom Thread’s release in 2017 by announcing he’d lost his passion for acting.
“I haven’t figured it out. But [the feeling] settled on me, and it’s just there,” Day-Lewis told W Magazine at the time. “Not wanting to see the film [Phantom Thread] is connected to the decision I’ve made to stop working as an actor. But it’s not why the sadness came to stay. That happened during the telling of the story, and I don’t really know why.”
Variety reported in June 2017 that Daniel’s representatives had started responding to movie offers with a statement confirming his retirement.
“Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” the statement 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.”
This wasn’t Daniel’s first retirement from acting, as he’d previously stepped away from Hollywood between 1997 and 2000. Following the release of The Boxer in 1997, Daniel moved to Florence, Italy to take on a shoemaking apprenticeship under Stefano Bemer — who designed shoes for Julio Iglesias and Andy Garcia, among many other celebrities. (Bemer died at age 48 in 2012.)
At the time, Daniel was lured back to moviemaking after a three-year absence to costar with Leonardo DiCaprio in legendary director Martin Scorsese’s 2002 period drama Gangs of New York. Daniel was rewarded for his portrayal of New York gangster William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting with an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA Film Award win for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Daniel again kept a low profile once he walked away from acting a second time in 2017, though he was occasionally photographed with his wife, filmmaker and novelist Rebecca Miller, in New York City in recent years. The couple are parents to sons Ronan, born 1998, and Cashel, born 2002.
While Ronan is forging his reputation as an emerging filmmaker, Cashel has become a professional fiddle player. He told The Sunday Times in April 2025 that both of his parents have been “incredibly supportive and encouraging of [his] music.”
“I’ll show my parents a [compositional] piece and they’re like, ‘That sounds great.’ I go back and forth between them. I wish I could talk about [my music] in more detail. But I am able to talk to them,” he said.
Daniel made a rare public appearance in January 2024 at the National Board Of Review 2024 Awards Gala in New York City, where he was photographed alongside Scorsese and Zac Efron.
NPR reported in 2017 that Daniel planned to spend some of his newfound free time by pursuing his childhood passion for woodworking.
“It was something I felt immediately drawn towards and I discovered that my hands were good, that I could make things and I’ve always loved to do that,” he said at the time. “I just remember that my middle son … overheard on the radio somebody saying, ‘Yeah, I think he makes chairs in his spare time,’ which he thought was one of the funniest things he ever heard and … he imagined me setting up a shop somewhere with ‘Dan’s Chairs’ as the shingle outside.”
As recently as March 2024, doubt was cast on the likelihood of Daniel ever returning to acting. His longtime friend and collaborator Jim Sheridan told Screen Daily last year that Daniel truly was “done” with the profession.
“I’d love to do something with him again,” the filmmaker said. “He’s like everybody else. He opens up the streamers and there’s seven thousand choices, none of them are good. Film has been moved out of the public domain into a private domain – you have a remote, you can stop it. It’s not the same experience. It’d be great to see Daniel coming back and doing something because he’s so good.”
As abruptly as Daniel’s second retirement came about, a shocking announcement in September 2024 confirmed Daniel had co-written upcoming drama Anemone with son Ronan and was attached to star in the movie. The project is being backed by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, with Ronan on board to direct.
Anemone’s plot details remain a mystery but Deadline reported in May 2025 that the film would deal with the complex relationships between brothers, fathers and sons. Joining Daniel in the cast will be How to Have Sex’s Samuel Bottomley and Safia Oakley-Green (Out of Darkness), along with Bean and Morton.
Anemone opens in limited release October 3 before expanding to theaters nationwide October 10.
