Daniel Day-Lewis’s comeback project Anemone releases first image ahead of New York Film Festival premiere

Eight years after Daniel Day-Lewis declared he was done with acting, he’s back.

In late 2024, he revealed he was returning to the profession to work with his son, and now the first image of his new film has been released.

Anemone stars Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton, and was directed by the three-time Oscar winner’s son Ronan Day-Lewis. The two also wrote the screenplay together.

The film will be premiere at the New York Film Festival, which runs from late September for three weeks, and will then be in wide release soon after. In Australia, it has been dated for October 16.

The photo from the film features Day-Lewis in profile, looking up at something. Bean is out-of-focus in the background. The two play brothers in the movie, which is set in Northern England.

Anemone is being billed as a family drama about a middle-aged suburban man (Bean) who seeks out his estranged brother (Day-Lewis) in the woods, where his kin has been living as a hermit. The logline references traumatic events in the brothers’ past and the legacies of personal and political violence.

Perhaps the two Day-Lewises mined their own relationship in co-writing a film that is said to explore the uneasy bonds between fathers, sons and brothers.

Anemone is not the first time Day-Lewis has worked with family. He starred in The Ballad of Jack and Rose in 2005, which his wife, Rebecca Miller, wrote and directed. It was the only feature he made with a female director.

Day-Lewis is widely considered one of the most talented thespians of his and any generation.

For a career spanning four decades, he was never prolific, having made only 21 films. He was nominated for an Oscar for six of those roles, converting 50 per cent of those nods to wins, for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood and Lincoln.

He also occasionally did TV and theatre in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Day-Lewis repeatedly worked with the same directors, including Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York), Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer) and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread).

It was after Phantom Thread in 2017 he released a statement confirming he was retiring from the screen. He later told W magazine that he made the formal announcement as a way to hold himself accountable, so that he wouldn’t be sucked into something else.

“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,” he said.

He previously quit acting in 1997 and moved to Florence to learn shoemaking from legendary cobbler Stefano Bemer. That time, he returned in 2002 in Gangs of New York.

Whether Day-Lewis is back for the medium-haul or this is just a blip to work with his kid remains to be seen.

He said of his 2017 retirement decision, “I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing. The work can seem vital. Irresistible, even. And if an audience believes it, that should be good enough for me. But, lately, it isn’t.”