Consider This from NPR - Daniel Day-Lewis was retired. His son is just getting started

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Eight years ago, Daniel Day-Lewis announced he was retired from acting. He offered no further comment. Retirement notwithstanding, the three-time winner of the Oscar for Best Actor stars in a new movie, out this week. He plays a man who long ago left the world he once knew – and then is contacted by a family member to come back.It was written with and directed by his son, Ronan Day-Lewis.Father and son speak about their new film, Anemone.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] episode was produced by Kathryn Fink and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by Jimmy Keeley. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Eight years ago, Daniel DeLewis quietly dropped a bomb on the film world in the form of a short statement, Daniel DeLewis will no longer be working as an actor, it said. This is a private decision, and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject. Well, the statement was shocking, in part because of how dedicated DeLewis was to his craft. Here he is talking to NPR in 2007. For me, the work is really pure pleasure. I do the work because I love to do it, not because I feel the need to punish myself. I do something else if I needed to punish myself.

I love to do the work that I do. It's a game. It was also surprising because he was so good at it. Day Lewis won a record three Best Actor Oscars, and he really inhabited each role, whether it was President Lincoln. Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment now. Or whether he was playing a ruthless oil prospector. There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.

Or maybe it's that the characters were inhabiting him. You start from scratch, you begin with nothing, you reduce yourself as far as possible to the state of an empty vessel, which may or may not fill with something that's going to be useful. De Lewis described it as a silent partnership. What could be more liberating than to explore with impunity, the darker recesses of one's imagination and psyche? And I suppose that has always appealed to me. And I always am most often intrigued by lives that seem very far removed from my own.

Well, retirement, notwithstanding, Daniel DeLewis has a new movie out. He plays a man who withdraws from the world he once knew. and then finds himself pulled back. Consider this, Daniel DeLewis is back in a film directed by his son about unfinished business and about what we passed down. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Consider This from NPR. For 20 years, a man has been living in the woods in the north of England.

He's got everything he needs to survive, roof over his head, cans of food, piles of firewood. He's isolated. He wants to keep it that way. No one knows where he is, except for one guy, Jim. And one day, Jim shows up unannounced, determined to bring him home. How did I work? How did I manage without you? I won't pretend I don't think about it from me. time to time but this is it jem this is my life does it after me

Daniel de lewis stars as the reclusive ray stoker in the new movie anemone which was directed by his son Ronan Day Lewis father and son are both in our New York studios Daniel and Ronan de Lewis welcome to all things considered thanks so much thank you so much for having us um let's jump straight into the story Daniel day Lewis your character, Ray, as I mentioned, has been off the grid for two decades, and then suddenly this guy, Jim, played by the absolutely terrific Sean Bean, walks through the door of your cabin. I know you don't want to give too many twists away, but what happens next? Well, Gem, as we discover him at the very beginning of the story, embarks on this mission

in agreement with his wife, Nessa. Gem is my brother and he has raised a boy with Nessa who is currently in a great deal of trouble and there's a connection there and so when he sets out on the journey to find me it's with the idea of as you said of trying to find some way of convincing me

to come back from this place I didn't realize you two were brothers until there's a great scene where the two of you, you're at the sink and you're brushing your teeth and you're rinsing and spitting together. And I suddenly thought, okay, these two either were roommates or they're brothers. They've shared a sink. Right, right. So we've already gotten this as a movie about brothers. Ronan, it's also, of course, about fathers and sons and what we pass on. What were you trying to explore here? Yeah, it was interesting because the kind of father-son threat of it crept up on us. We kind of realized that Brian had to become a real person and not just this kind of footnote on the periphery of the brother's story. And I think when we first created a scene of him alone in his room, it really opened up his perspective and this sense of the kind of fascination with the mystery of the past life of your parent. Yeah. You know, after, I don't know how long it was before we realized that two fellas in a shed, like, we just couldn't live with that anymore. I was thinking, I hope a woman will come in at some point.

Right. Yeah. What is the challenge, Rune in of, okay, this is your featured directorial debut, and I imagine it would always be a challenge to direct one's own parent. And, oh, by the way, your father is this freaking Daniel DeLuis. What was that like? yeah i mean i'd sort of um been thinking of it in such a kind of low stakes playful way for so long because of the way the the script came together which was just like us at the kitchen table working on it yeah y'all wrote the screenplay together yes yeah we wrote the script together so

but there was a moment i think when we first got on set where it did hit me just the the gravity of it but um it felt pretty easy to transition into that Daniel DeLewis, this is your first movie in, what, seven or eight years? Yes, it is, yes. And did your son have to twist your arm to unretire? No, it may seem like that from the outside, but no, if anything, I think it was really my wish to work with Ronan, knowing that I decided to work at something else for an unknown period of time. there was a kind of anticipatory sadness in me, knowing that Ronan would make films.

And I thought, I wonder if we can cook something up just for the pure pleasure of working together. So let's go to the mystery, the trauma, I guess is a better word, the trauma at the center of this film, which has to do with Northern Ireland. Ray, your character, Daniel, is a former English soldier. He fought there. He carries the legacy of things that happened there, that he. did. I wondered why Northern Ireland? There have been so many films, so many dramas that have explored the troubles. What intrigued the two of you about wanting to revisit that history? Yeah, no, that's certainly true. I mean, but largely the perspective of stories told about the

troubles have been from the other side of the fence. You know, I grew up with sort of deep attachment to both Britain and to Ireland. I have dual citizenship. I have close friends who were on both sides of that terrible argument. Yeah, like, as my dad was saying, his connection to Ireland. And then also having grown up there from seven to 13, we learned about the troubles in school. And I think since then, it's really loomed large in my imagination. And I think it was also important to me that the film is looking at war and human bloodshed from almost like an omniscient perspective. Well, and I was just looking, Ronan, you were born in 1998.

So you must have no direct memory of before the Good Friday Accord, before the, you know, when the troubles were very much live. And conversely, over the years, I spent quite a lot of time in the north of Ireland, specifically in Belfast, during the troubles when they're at the very worst. And it felt like a very, very different and a very threatening place. Yeah. So you're talking about, you know, it matters to have spent time on the ground there to to remotely begin to understand this story.

Let's go back to where we started and the cabin in the woods where your character has spent a long time away from the public before finally re-emerging. It is not lost on me, Daniel DeLewis, that you're doing something of the same thing, having stayed out of the public eye for years. Are you drawing on something personal there? You're known as a method actor.

No, I'm so glad you asked me that question. I'm delighted to have a chance to respond. on to it because I think my name is sort of rarely mentioned that the word reclusive or recluse isn't attached to it. And I am not a recluse. I just don't live in the eye of the camera. You know, I mean, if you're not visible publicly, you're deemed to be somehow retired from ordinary everyday life. You very often see that phrase, break silence. But all it means, is that, you know, I talk to people all the time. I'm just not talking into a microphone

right, right, right. Talking to friends and family and working in different ways, in different places. So life goes on, and it is absolutely not the life of a recluse. Well, let me say thank you to both of you. This has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. Oh, for us, too. Thanks for having us. It's the very much not reclusive actor, Daniel Day Lewis.

Thank you. And his son, the director Ronan Day Lewis, speaking with us from our New York Bureau about their new movie, Anemone. It's out through Focus Features, which we should note is a financial sponsor of NPR. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Connor Donovan, with audio engineering by Jimmy Keely. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadanan. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. Thank you to our considerate. this plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and who help keep public radio strong.

Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.