One day, God willing, they’ll make a film about the filming of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017). This might be a documentary or a drama, a Shakespearean tragedy or a frantic farce, but it would take us behind the scenes at a central London townhouse to show how a great actor lost the will to go on. The shoot was too long, the conditions too stressful and the pure thrill of performing simply wasn’t there any more. On completing his role as the society dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, Daniel Day-Lewis announced that he was calling it quits. “I need to believe in the value of what I’m doing,” the then 60-year-old actor explained. And just lately, he added, that had not been the case.
On learning of the death of the US president Calvin Coolidge, Dorothy Parker famously remarked, “How can they tell?” It’s tempting to ask the same question of Day-Lewis’s retirement, given how infrequently he appeared on-screen in the latter part of his career. He’s made a mere seven films since the turn of the century and reputedly considered his future at the end of each one. He’s the most fragile, ambivalent, unstarry movie star of them all. Perversely, of course, that’s part of his mystique.
If we can’t have a new Day-Lewis film this summer, we can at least have an old one, unearthed and reissued. My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) casts him as Johnny, a peroxide neofascist punk who’s redeemed by the love of a good man (in this case, Omar, an Anglo-Asian schoolmate). This was the young actor’s big breakthrough role, landing in UK cinemas just ahead of his turn in Merchant-Ivory’s A Room with a View (1985). Here, he’s third-billed on the cast, blending in with the brickwork; a component part as opposed to the headline player. Directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is a rough, ready (and yes, slightly stagey) account of immigrant dreams in Thatcher-era south London. Viewed from today’s vantage, it’s a fascinating timepiece. Frears’s film spotlights a bygone Britain of donkey jackets, metal dustbins and candy-striped shop awnings. But it also shows the poignant lost world of a pre-stardom Day-Lewis.
The actor knows how the public sees him: as a “mad bastard” (his words), away with the fairies and at the mercy of method acting to the point where his preparation is almost as legendary as the performance itself. The man obstinately stays in character, tries to become who he’s playing. So he remained in a wheelchair while making My Left Foot (1989), lived on prison rations during the filming of In the Name of the Father (1993) and skinned animals in the woods for The Last of the Mohicans (1992). It’s a process that’s paid dividends: he’s won an unprecedented three Best Actor Oscars (for My Left Foot, 2007’s There Will Be Blood and 2012’s Lincoln). But he concedes that it can make him painful company – a burden for both his family at home and the long-suffering crew on the set. Imagine working flat-out through the day on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) and then having to sit in the canteen next to glassy-eyed Bill the Butcher.
I met Day-Lewis once years ago, and he was thoughtful and friendly and didn’t seem mad at all. He explained that he accepted so few roles because he never wanted to feel that he was going through the motions and working only out of habit. He also said that remaining in character helped him maintain focus throughout the staccato stop-start rhythm of the typical movie set. “That way there isn’t the rupture every time the camera stops, every time you become aware of the cables and the anoraks and hear the sound of the walkie-talkies.” It was probably pure self-delusion, he admitted, but the technique worked for him.
I’m wondering if Phantom Thread was the breaking point: the production that pushed him beyond his natural limit. Anderson and Day-Lewis’s second collaboration (after There Will Be Blood) charted the dark 1950s-set romance-cum-power struggle of a controlling designer and a lowly foreign-born waitress (Vicky Krieps). The film is claustrophobic; the shoot was as well. In March 2017, the crew moved into 3 Fitzroy Square for an “invisible shoot”, which involved the house doubling as a stage-set, digs and storage space. On previous jobs, Day-Lewis had been able to keep the production at arm’s length. Here he found himself stuck being finicky Reynolds Woodcock in perpetual sweaty close-up for week after week, both on-screen and off. The shoot was “awful”, he remarked, a logistical “nightmare”, while his persona kept grating on everyone’s nerves. “It’s hard to work with a crew that really hates you,” he said.
If there is a lesson to be taken from this tale of actorly woe, it’s that no method remains foolproof and everyone has their limit. Even when they’re a genius. Even when they have three Academy Awards on the shelf. The ideal for Day-Lewis has always been flow state, full immersion, the ongoing bliss of uninterrupted creativity. In Phantom Thread’s townhouse, though, he suddenly couldn’t see past the camera tracks and cables and the irritated crew members. The role was a triumph; it secured him another Oscar nomination. But crucially – fatally – he no longer believed it himself.
It’s the fate of famous actors that even retirement risks being regarded as another performance of sorts, the equivalent of a teasing dramatic pause. Day-Lewis, it should be noted, hasn’t especially helped himself in this regard. He retired once before, between 1997 and 2001, and recently broke this latest vow to appear in a film made by his 26-year-old son. The forthcoming Anemone is billed as an ensemble family drama, set in the UK. It casts Day-Lewis alongside Sean Bean and Samantha Morton. Conceivably, it makes him a component part again, just as he was four decades back in My Beautiful Laundrette.
It’s an actor’s prerogative to change their mind. Day-Lewis can retire and un-retire just as often as he likes. All the same, it’s likely that Anemone will turn out to be a quiet last gasp as opposed to the start of a renaissance. The film might be good or it might be bad, but until it’s released – and probably after that, too – I’ll continue to regard Phantom Thread as Day-Lewis’s real final bow. It might even count as his ultimate screen role: the one that trapped him and broke him and returned him to the real world. Reynolds Woodcock winds up sick and needy, a prisoner in his London townhouse. Day-Lewis was luckier. He was able to get out and go home.
‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ is back in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from 1 August
