From the method acting diaries: When Daniel Day-Lewis wouldn’t talk to a “mortified” Richard E Grant for three months
By the definition of their profession, actors are not who you think they are.
Their job is to inhabit other people, and even when they are being interviewed or talking to fans, they are, to some extent, doing a performance of themselves. Judging by their public personas, you might assume that Daniel Day-Lewis and Richard E Grant would be lovely in real life, especially with each other, but when they worked together, one of them found it pretty unnerving.
Day-Lewis had already won an Oscar by the time the two were cast in Martin Scorsese’s 1993 period romance The Age of Innocence, and Grant was an icon in the making for Bruce Robinson’s 1987 cult classic, Withnail and I. However, he had yet to become the beloved figure that he is today, and played only a small part in the film.
The Age of Innocence stars Day-Lewis as a wealthy New York solicitor during the Gilded Age who falls in love with a disgraced divorceé, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. This causes friction with his friends and acquaintances, especially since he is supposed to marry a socially conscious younger woman, played by Winona Ryder. Based on Edith Wharton’s novel, the story focuses on the savagery of New York’s high society, which disguises cruelty under layers of affectation and decorum. Grant plays a gossipy member of the solicitor’s inner circle, a young aristocrat who can’t be trusted.
On the first day of shooting, Grant was summoned to Day-Lewis’s trailer and had an enjoyable conversation in which the two thespians hit it off. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be a great job,’” he said on the Dish podcast. When shooting began, however, he was in for a rude awakening.
“Once the film started shooting,” he remembered, “[Day-Lewis] didn’t speak to me for the next three months. He’d literally walk past, this close, and I’d, in the first week I’d go, ‘Morning, Dan.’ Just iced. And I was mortified.”
Pfeiffer came to the rescue to explain the actor’s process. “His character hates your character in the book and in the story,” Grant remembered her telling him, “So he will not speak to you.” Sure enough, Day-Lewis pretended Grant didn’t exist until the final day of shooting when he broke out of character, put his arms around him, and said that it had been great to work with him.
“I’ve never seen him again,” the Withnail and I actor said. “But it was so odd. You know, he has three Oscars, so obviously it’s worked.”
Refusing to speak to a co-star is one of the least extreme things that Day-Lewis has done for a role. One actor was so scared of the Oscar-winner’s formidable on-set behaviour as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that he quit and was replaced by Paul Dano.
Even Steven Spielberg, who directed Day-Lewis in Lincoln, has admitted to feeling intimidated and more than a little awed by the actor’s performance. As Grant conceded, however, his process clearly works. There are few actors of his generation who are as respected and celebrated as Day-Lewis.
