‘Theatre is an elitist artform for privileged people’: Daniel Day-Lewis talks class, cinema and his crush on Mary Poppins

The actor Daniel Day-Lewis railed against audiences being priced out of theatres, and what he perceived as a continued snobbery concerning cinema in the UK at an event at the London film festival.

Speaking to the critic Mark Kermode for a lengthy conversation in front of an audience at the BFI Southbank, Day-Lewis said he felt “there’s still an elitism in this country that theatre is the superior form”. His drama training at the Bristol Old Vic school had encouraged in him the sense that theatre work was the goal. “Then there’s films: bit dodgy. Television: like, really? OK, you gotta pay the gas bill. That was the thinking.

“There was no concession [in the training] to movies at all. But secretly, most of us [students] longed to make movies, because we’d been raised on movies, and mov