He’s played an American president, a wheelchair-bound poet and Leonardo DiCaprio ’s worst nightmare. Now, after eight years of retirement, Daniel Day-Lewis is back, portraying a tortured recluse in Anemone , a taut psychological drama directed by his 27-year-old son, Ronan. The reviews have been so-so – and yet the excitement over Day-Lewis’s return is striking and arguably unprecedented in Hollywood. Forget Oasis or Radiohead. For cinephiles, this is the 2025 entertainment industry comeback to savour.

But Day-Lewis has always been different – a rock star of the big screen. Across his 40-year career, he single-handedly made method acting cool – where every other actor in the history of cinema has encouraged us to think of it as the worst idea ever. And that is just the beginning

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