The first movie that made Daniel Day-Lewis quit acting: “He threw in the towel”
Daniel Day-Lewis is often cited as the greatest actor of his generation. Between the early 1980s and 2010s, he only appeared in 20 feature films, but somehow still managed to earn three Oscars and three further nominations. He is known for his uncanny ability to completely transform into characters, whether it’s an egomaniacal oilman in There Will Be Blood or the eponymous president in Lincoln.
Day-Lewis’s process as an actor is legendary. He goes deep into character, requiring everyone around him to adjust to their new collaborator, who is not the actor they met before shooting began. Richard E Grant recounted in his memoir that, after a delightful first encounter on the set of The Age of Innocence, he was surprised and a little unnerved to find that, once shooting began, Day-Lewis refused to speak to him or even acknowledge that he existed for a full three months.
Giving co-stars the cold shoulder is hardly the most extreme thing he’s done to get in character, though. To prepare for his role as a wrongly convicted prisoner in the film In the Name of the Father, Day-Lewis locked himself in solitary confinement for three days without access to water. To prepare for The Last of the Mohicans, he lived in the North Carolina wilderness for a month. At this point, he is probably the most prepared person in Hollywood for the apocalypse.
Still, all of this intensity is pretty hard to maintain, so when Day-Lewis announced his retirement from acting in 2017, it seemed as though he was finally ready to put himself out of the misery of his own making. It was not the first time he reached a breaking point with acting, though. 20 years before, he quit the job entirely after one particularly gruelling film.
Released in 1997, The Boxer starred Day-Lewis as a former IRA member who tries to follow the straight and narrow after being released from prison. Brian Cox co-starred as the father of the woman he falls in love with, which meant that he was on set to witness Day-Lewis’s gruelling preparation firsthand.
In his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Cox recalled watching the young actor greet his cast members in character and train tirelessly on set for the fight scenes. On one occasion, Cox and director Jim Sheridan were hanging out in Sheridan’s caravan, watching the antics from afar as the actor skipped rope and shadow-boxed. “Ye Gods, it was exhausting just watching him,” Cox wrote.
When Day-Lewis announced after the film wrapped that he had had enough, Cox wasn’t surprised. “He threw in the towel, decided No more and announced he was taking early retirement,” the actor wrote. “Perhaps he realised how silly it all was.”
It seems more likely that the opposite was the case. Day-Lewis was so dedicated to his method of acting that he would rather quit the profession entirely than do a more lowkey version of it. His exhaustion didn’t last anyway. He took a break to become a cobbler in Florence, as you do and returned to making movies after three years for Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.
