[Source : Entertainment Weekly]

“It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about,” the three-time Oscar winner said of his eight-year hiatus from acting.

It turns out Daniel Day-Lewis never really wanted to stop acting.

Eight years after announcing his retirement, the three-time Oscar winner is returning to the silver screen in his son’s film Anemone, and he recently reflected on the journey in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“Looking back on it now — I would have done well to just keep my mouth shut, for sure,” Day-Lewis said.

“It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work. I never, you know… Apparently, I’ve been accused of retiring twice now. I never meant to retire from anything! I just wanted to work on something else for a while.”

Day-Lewis, 68, most recently appeared in 2017’s Phantom Thread, which reunited him with There Will Be Blood filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson.

The actor announced his retirement in a statement via his representative that same year.

Shortly after that initial announcement, the notoriously private Day-Lewis claimed that he issued that statement in order to make the decision more definite. “I knew it was uncharacteristic to put out a statement,” he told W magazine. 

“But I did want to draw a line. I didn’t want to get sucked back into another project. 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.”

Now Day-Lewis is clarifying that he never fell out of love with acting, but feared that future film roles would take a heavy toll on him.

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