Daniel Day-Lewis can’t seem to stay retired. Anemone, his new movie, ends his second major hiatus from acting, this one lasting since 2017’s Phantom Thread. It also finds him not only writing for the screen for the first time but working with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed the film and shares writing credit. Anemone concerns two brothers, Jem (Sean Bean) and Ray (Day-Lewis), both ex-soldiers who served on the British side of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Ray has been in hiding off the grid for over 15 years, and Jem has arrived at his cabin to convince him to return to civilization in order to help Brian, a teenager who Ray fathered but Jem has raised. The contours of the film are familiar: The two brothers, we can be fairly sure, will booze and bond and snipe at each other until some cathartic recitation of past traumas, after which Ray will leave with Jem for civilization. What gives Anemone its charge is its unrelenting intensity, an intensity that thrums not only in the performances but in the very literary dialogue—“we learnt our violence from the world champion,” is how Ray describes their traumatic upbringing—and the 27-year-old Ronan Day-Lewis’ precocious command of the language of cinema. Metaphors and symbols abound. Ronan, whose main artistic practice is painting, has a visual sensibility that is as detailed and relentless as Daniel’s acting.
It’s nearly impossible to shake the impression while watching this movie about fathers and sons that the father and son who made it are enacting some version of their own history. The film lobs the biographical fallacy like a meatball over home plate, waiting for the unwary critic-at-bat to hit it with all their might. We hear over and over that Ray would leave on tours to Northern Ireland, during which he would drive himself to extremes on mysterious, never fully described missions. Prior to each undertaking, he would cease to be present in his family life, disappearing before actually departing. After he came back, he would struggle to adapt to being a civilian again. Finally, when it became too much for him for reasons I will not spoil here, he vanished into the wilderness. What coaxes him out of his seclusion (dare we call it retirement?) is the need to help his son.
The biographical fallacy is a fallacy for a reason—artists can and do draw from more than their own lives—but one reason the film invites this reading is that Day-Lewis is as fabled for the stories behind his roles as he is for his work in front of the camera. And while it’s clear in interviews that he resents these legends, he has often contributed to their creation. Day-Lewis has set a standard for chameleonic transformations that is nearly without parallel, and he has also garnered a reputation in the public eye as a true weirdo, a romantic, tormented genius out of the 19th century. I first saw Day-Lewis’ work in My Left Foot when I was a child. It remains a favorite movie to this day, one of the handful of films that made me want to be an actor. I also struggled during my brief “career” (if I can even use that term to refer to the handful of professional and college productions I acted in from the ages of 12 to 25) with the extremes to which I felt the need to go to embody characters. And so I have always been haunted in some way by Day-Lewis. He is clearly among the greatest living screen actors, with a career that includes several performances that no one else could have accomplished at his level. But from when I quit acting through to when I wrote my own book on The Method, until now, I have always wondered whether the brilliance he is capable of requires the lengths to which he drives himself. As his techniques have been adopted by a whole generation of self-serious actors both good (Christian Bale) and not (Jared Leto), I have also come to wonder if the legends are even true. It turns out that the answers to both questions are far more complicated than I thought.
On March 7, 1986, two British films featuring the then-unknown Day-Lewis opened in the United States on the same day. They announced as loudly as possible that the young graduate of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School was, as director Stephen Frears put it in the New York Times, “sort of the white hope in England now.” In A Room With a View and My Beautiful Laundrette, Day-Lewis demonstrated a range that most actors spend years chasing, rendering himself almost unrecognizable in two supporting turns that could not be more different tonally or stylistically.
Room With a View also established a template for prestige British literary adaptation that similarly minded films, often made by the movie’s core team of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, would follow well into this century. It is lush, sedulously faithful to its source text, acted with great precision, and, let’s be honest, a little boring. Although it is based on a novel by a closeted gay man and made by a creative team that included a gay couple, its queerness, like almost everything else about it, is entirely relegated to subtext. In the movie, Day-Lewis plays Cecil Vyse, a pretentious prig. Cecil is the kind of man whose idea of flirting is to lean out of a window, cigarette in hand, and tell his quarry, Lucy, “Don’t move! … Did you know you are a Leonardo, smiling at things beyond our ken?” He’s a ridiculous character, and Day-Lewis performs him with a delicious irony, remaining, in classical English fashion, a half-step out of the character, looking on with bemusement. The performance is entertaining but sacrifices deeper engagement on the altar of charm.
Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi, is a far more subversive affair. Filmed with an emphasis on the grime of its working-class immigrant characters’ lives, Laundrette is explicitly about a gay love affair between two men, one of whom is an Indian British man, the other of whom is an ex-Nazi skinhead. As Johnny, the gay ex-skinhead who reunites with Gordon Warnecke’s Omar and begins an affair with him in the back room of Omar’s family’s laundromat, Day-Lewis attacks a far more sincere role. While not the film’s protagonist, Johnny has a fascinating redemption arc, one that sees him, over the course of a handful of scenes, forswearing not only right-wing politics but violence itself, and paying an immense price to protect the man he loves. Watching the film closely, we can also glimpse what would become a hallmark of Day-Lewis’ work, the way he maps out the inner workings of a character and never loses sight of them no matter how wild the performance gets. In Omar and Johnny’s first scene together, Johnny and his gang are harassing Omar and his family when Omar recognizes him. He runs up to Johnny, smiling, and simply says, “It’s me!” It takes Day-Lewis seven seconds to reply, seconds during which he surreptitiously checks Omar out, looks at him with an almost wolfish hunger, smiles charmingly, and looks away, putting his hard-ass mask back on to say, “I know who it is.” The whole character and the dilemma he will face over the course of the film is right there in those seven wordless seconds.
In the following few years, Day-Lewis was part of a wave of British actors coming to America and making a huge impact on the movies. A New York Times profile of Day-Lewis from 1993 lists his cohort as including Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Philip Davis, and Phil Daniels. If Day-Lewis has, from the vantage point of today, clearly eclipsed all of these actors, it is in part due to luck, and in part to do with his selection of roles, and what he has accomplished within them. The films he would make after his breakthrough double whammy owe a lot more to Laundrette than they do to Room. They required him to take immense risks, to assay roles far outside his own experience, and to ditch the tea-and-crumpets irony. He is drawn to roles that place him within the American screen-acting tradition, rather than the tradition of the English stage that he and most of his Room co-stars came up within. That tradition, with its emphasis on textual precision and technical expertise, was incarnated most clearly in Sir Laurence Olivier, who, during his life, was considered the greatest living English actor of stage and screen. It is also Sir Larry who is often recounted as asking Dustin Hoffman—who was running himself ragged to prepare for his role in The Marathon Man—“Why don’t you try acting, dear boy?”
When asked in an interview in 2005 about this story, Day-Lewis responded, “Without any disrespect to Olivier … I think it says more about what Olivier failed to understand about the process of certain film acting than about Hoffman’s process.” He then name-checked a lineage that he clearly locates himself within, one that includes Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, and, of course, Robert De Niro, who is probably the largest influence on Day-Lewis and his work.
Like Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro rose to stardom off back-to-back appearances in two very different films in the same year, 1973’s Mean Streets and Bang the Drum Slowly. Like Day-Lewis, De Niro continued to switch up the kinds of parts he played in film after film. Like Day-Lewis, De Niro established a new standard for lived-in intensity in his performances until he eventually was crowned the greatest living screen actor. And like Day-Lewis, De Niro became as known for his preparatory process as he was for the work that resulted. Thanks to De Niro’s donation of his papers to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, we know a great deal about that process in its specifics. As Richard Colin Tait masterfully narrates in his dissertation on “Robert De Niro’s Method,” the actor’s process rested on deep research, physical conditioning, buying his own props, and creating elaborate original routines, all aimed at, as his early teacher Stella Adler often described it, “earning the right to play the part.” To play a clueless baseball catcher from Georgia in Bang the Drum Slowly, for example, De Niro traveled to the state to record people speaking, learned how to play baseball, adopted a baseball player’s training regimen, and developed an array of chewing tobacco moves that he used to convey subtext. For Mean Streets, he devised an entirely different panther-on-Adderall physicality and went so deep in his research on the character that he wound up writing new scenes for him. Most famously, for Raging Bull, De Niro not only trained as a boxer, but packed on something like 60 pounds, eating his way through Italy and France to portray the washed-up, older version of Jake LaMotta that bookends the film. That film not only earned De Niro an Oscar but ended up atop many lists of the best movies of the decade.
Anyone who knows anything about Day-Lewis can see where all this is going. The stories of Day-Lewis’ process are legion. Often he tells them himself, as he looks bashfully at his shoes. Other times he must hear them recited, and he looks like a man undergoing an appendectomy without anesthesia. There’s the flintlock he carried with him everywhere in The Last of the Mohicans. There’s the refusal to ever leave the wheelchair when playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot. There’s the requirement that the cast and crew address him by his character’s name in Lincoln. The most Day-Lewis-y of these stories comes from his time making In the Name of the Father, which he discussed over a decade ago in response to a question about whether the rumors that he slept in his character’s jail cell were true. The actor replied that they weren’t because he didn’t exactly sleep. Ruffians came and harassed him every couple of hours and then, at the end of a couple of days of this, they hired someone from Special Branch to interrogate him for nine hours without a break.
Perhaps you are asking yourself the same question I asked when I encountered this tale: Why, in the name of all that is holy, would anyone do that to themselves? I mean, staying in a wheelchair 24/7 to play someone who is severely physically disabled makes a certain sort of sense, as does going to the middle of nowhere and getting trained in wilderness survival in order to make Last of the Mohicans. But why subject yourself to literal torture? Day-Lewis explained it this way: “This was a man who was innocent,” who confessed to something he didn’t do. “That was the only way I could figure out to try and come close to an understanding of why an innocent man destroys his own life.”
There are lots of ways one could try to understand that. Many actors do research, or use their imaginations, or engage in a newly popular process involving their dreams. Another way of bridging this gap between the actor and the character is called substitution. I may have never confessed to a murder I did not commit, but I know what it is to feel guilty, and I know what it is to give in to immense pressures that I should be resisting. I could, then, bore into those experiences and expand them from within until they grow into the epic size needed for the role. This process, of drawing from the self to create the character, is a fundamental technique of Method acting, a thing which Day-Lewis is often associated with, even though the process that he undergoes is in fact the Method’s polar opposite. (Among other things, Lee Strasberg, the father of Method acting, did not want actors doing much research and cautioned against remaining in character all the time. Konstantin Stanislavski, whose teachings inspired Strasberg, mocked the kinds of processes Day-Lewis undergoes.)
So again, why do this? Lots of actors do it because it gets great headlines and fuels awards chatter. Acting is fundamentally mysterious on some level, but if you can point to a step-by-step process that is filled with things the audience can understand (even if they find it bonkers), it’s easier to sell your movie and yourself. That doesn’t get us any closer to a real answer, however. Perhaps, then, the better question is less why would anyone do this but rather why does this particular actor do it? Jim Sheridan, the director of Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and The Boxer, has said that Day-Lewis seeks perfection in his work because on some level he hates acting. Day-Lewis disputes this, of course, and has several reasons of his own to justify his process. The first is that he is motivated by curiosity. He gets interested in a character, and then more interested, moving to deeper and deeper levels of curiosity and knowledge. This vision of his preparation is, thus, a joyful one—more joyful, perhaps, than playing the role itself, a thing that at times appears to torment him. Never have I seen Day-Lewis more unhappy than in trying to discuss The Ballad of Jack and Rose with Charlie Rose, joined by his wife and director, Rebecca Miller, both of them fielding questions about his process like they were sitting through a marriage counseling session. But Day-Lewis also envisions the preparation for a role as a filling up of the self. You are gathering all these routines, the clothing, the mannerisms, the life experiences of the character. Then, once the cameras are rolling, you begin, as he puts it, “scooping yourself out,” until, like Ray in Anemone, the mission is over and all that’s left of you is a husk.
Another reason, the one I find most persuasive, is that if you are able to live as fully as possible in the imagined reality of the character, you enter a flow state where you stop thinking and start doing and being. Day-Lewis struggles most in interviews to answer questions that require what he terms “objectifying,” or thinking outside of the headspace of the character. When he is on set, he wants to never be objective, to never interrupt the process of being and doing in order to think. When asked once about specific physical gestures he made in There Will Be Blood, he replied, “my decision-making process has to happen in such a way that I’m absolutely unaware of it, otherwise I’m objectifying a situation that demands something different.” When asked about the meaning of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, he said he can’t answer the question, because “there was no conscious intention to show him as one way or another.”
This state of pure being is the actor’s equivalent of when great athletes are “in the zone,” or the trance that a jazz improviser enters when they’re really cooking. The name for it is a Russian word, perezhivanie, which means experiencing. It is this state that Stanislavski’s theories and exercises were meant to enable the actor to achieve. But as those theories made their way to the U.S. and gave rise to the various acting programs of teachers like Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, and Lee Strasberg, a new problem arose. The theories had all been developed for the stage, where you play a character from beginning to end, usually in a linear progression, without stopping, over a relatively short period of time. How, acting students began asking, can you adapt all this to a film set, where things stop and start constantly, where there may be gaps of hours or even days, where you have to repeat things in takes, and where stories are shot out of order? Remaining in character at all times, which predates Day-Lewis’ career by at least a decade or two, evolved as a solution to this problem. From this perspective, the De Niro/Day-Lewis techniques can be seen as practical, even if they’re also easy to make the butt of the joke, as in Tropic Thunder. Day-Lewis is clearly eccentric in some ways—witness the reports of speaking to his actual dead father while onstage in Hamlet—but I’m not sure why this should bother us much. Art is often made by eccentrics; a tolerance for eccentricity is what makes the arts so attractive to many of us weirdos as children. So long as he isn’t hurting anyone, what matters is whether or not the process works. Looking at his filmography, it’s pretty hard to argue with the results.
Not every Day-Lewis film is great, but his body of work as an actor is nearly unimpeachable. All the discussion of his process—discussion which my failed attempts to interview him for this article make pretty clear he’s sick of—can obscure what he can actually do as an actor. Take My Left Foot, the film that elevated him into the pantheon and won him the first of his three Best Actor Oscars, still the most of any performer. There is the physical feat of portraying the real-life painter and author Christy Brown, who, due to cerebral palsy, only had significant mobility in his left foot. But the film is far more than an actor proving his worth by playing disabled, a practice that is understandably maligned today. The Christy Brown who wrote the autobiography of the same name is far from a saint. He’s funny, charming, angry, horny, yearning; he has experienced the fullness of life regardless of the limitations of his body. The film cannot tell that full story, in part because movies can only hold your attention for so long. So it’s up to Day-Lewis to bring that fullness to the screen. The relentless care that he took to adopt Brown’s physicality allows him to spend his energy on Brown’s complex, thorny humanity. It is this quality that stops the film from dipping into sentimentality, a poison pond that films about ennobled disabled characters almost always wind up dying in.
On a more micro level, every actor could learn a great deal from how Day-Lewis delivers a speech, the way he traces the emotional and storytelling logic of monologues like a master calligrapher. Yes, he can deliver a huge wall of text. He can yell at us about milkshakes as Daniel Plainview, or welcome us to the show as Bill the Butcher. But he can do a great deal more than that. He has two barnburners in Anemone, one telling a tale of revenge on a pedophile priest, the other unveiling the trauma that caused his exile. Both speeches are fascinating to watch because Ray’s relationship to his stories visibly changes while he’s telling them. The first is a shaggy-dog story involving, among other things, a healthy dose of laxatives and several pints of Guinness. We begin in a place of comedy as he mocks a man from his past, and then the comedy gives forth involuntarily to a pain he’s trying to hold back as he discloses that this man raped him—but then, as his account reaches its climax, it becomes clear that Ray is toying with both Jem and with us. It could be that the whole thing was made up. We want the tale to be both true, because we don’t want to be gullible, and false, because the story is so awful. In the second speech, he is by turns self-pitying, defiant, grieving, guilty, angry, defeated. But it doesn’t feel like he’s just shooting off emotional fireworks for our enjoyment. Each of these turns is a moment of discovery on the character’s part as he careens, out of control, further and further into his own past.
Day-Lewis is also an exquisite listener, and, as it is the film where he listens the best, Lincoln may very well be both his finest film and performance. It’s a multilayered movie, one that rewards repeated viewings. The first time I watched it, I was simply dazzled by how writer Tony Kushner and director Steven Spielberg made what sounded on paper like a snoozefest into an often funny, insightful, inspiring story of politics that moved with the rhythms of a thriller. I swooned to Day-Lewis’ “Now!” speech, the one that will play in countless in memoriam montages after his death. But on repeat viewings, what the film uncovers is Lincoln the great tactician, Lincoln the man whose countless funny anecdotes and odd homilies belie the carefulness with which he takes in everything around him, his attention attuned to finding whatever opportunities might arise to accomplish his goals. Listening—really listening—is one of the hardest things to do as an actor. It’s one thing to say lines you know by heart as if they’re spontaneous, but it’s something quite different to take in lines you know equally well as if you’re just hearing them for the first time. In directing class, we were always instructed to watch the actors who aren’t speaking. In a good production, their listening is just as important as everyone else’s talking. In Lincoln, listening is essential. Without it, the film is simply the story of a blowhard.
If there’s one thing Day-Lewis struggles with as an actor, it is playing everyday people. De Niro struggled with this too—never has he looked so lost as in the 1984 film Falling in Love, where he plays the human equivalent of cream cheese: an architect who lives in upstate New York. While The Age of Innocence is a wonderful film, Day-Lewis does not seem to know how to play Newland Archer, a paragon of his community, until he starts to go awry. At the film’s beginning, Newland is the master of the codes and rituals of Gilded Age New York society. He always does what’s proper but isn’t a prude like Cecil Vyse. He is beloved by those around him. This status quo is shaken to its core when he falls in love with a woman who not only isn’t his fiancée but has left her philandering husband and revenge-fucked his secretary (the horror!). When having to play a man who moves with grace and ease within his society, a man who does not stand out, but deliberately stays within, Day-Lewis appears confused. It is only as the character moves out of the inner circle of acceptability that Day-Lewis finds his range, and, in an odd paradox, it is only once the character loses his cool that the actor playing him regains his. De Niro solved the normal-person problem with an extended period of hackwork in second-rate projects; Day-Lewis solved it by never really trying to play a normal man again. The two films in which he came closest are The Ballad of Jack and Rose (in which he plays a terminally ill back-to-the-land utopian whose daughter is in love with him) and The Crucible, in which he played John Proctor, Salem, Massachusetts’ Big Man on Campus.
For Jack and Rose, Day-Lewis helped build the houses that his character’s commune lives in with the set department and, as his wife Rebecca Miller had written and was directing the film, lived apart from her and his family in a separate cottage. As Michael Schulman described it in the New Yorker, “Since his character wastes away from a heart ailment in the course of the film, he starved himself, eating a meagre vegan diet,” becoming so thin that Miller worried for his safety. But The Crucible appears to have been a bit of a departure from the canon of Day-Lewis legends. As Michael Gaston, a prolific character actor who was on set for the whole shoot, told me, “I remember hearing all this stuff about him being super ‘Methody’ and difficult, and insisting on stuff—like in My Left Foot how he wouldn’t come out of the chair, even at lunch. It couldn’t be farther from the truth in my experience.” On set, Day-Lewis asked to be called “Dan,” rather than his character’s name, and Gaston’s experience of working with him was one of consummate professionalism. He didn’t really socialize (“he’s shy, honestly,” is how Gaston described it), but he was never anything less than prepared and hardworking and generous, “an absolute joy to work with.”
Gaston has little patience for the legends of Day-Lewis. “I remember a year later when the film came out, [a] magazine had an article about how he remained in character the whole time, and he had refused to speak to an actor who was playing one of his antagonists in that story,” he remembered. “It was utter bullshit. My character hung him. I hung his wife. I ripped his children out of his arms. And every day we were in the makeup chair together, we talked about our kids. He gave me a present for our son who had just been born.” He was generous in other ways too. One day, director Nicholas Hytner spent the day shooting the scene of John Proctor’s execution. As daylight began to fade, it came time to shoot the reaction shots of the background actors. As the transportation department began to hustle Day-Lewis, Gaston, and the rest of the cast away, Day-Lewis turned back. Hytner was attempting—rather humorously—to act out the physicality of a hanging victim to give them something to respond to. “Daniel sees it, and he turns, and he just starts sprinting. He leaps over this swampy bit and jumps up onto this gallows and starts very realistically, very grotesquely, imitating what Hytner had just done, so that the background could see him, and have that emotional reaction that was more real.” Other actors I’ve spoken to who worked with Day-Lewis, none of whom wanted to be interviewed formally, had only nice things to say about him, even those who played his antagonists. The picture they paint is of a man who is quite sensitive, hardworking, kind, and is always, as his wife told Charlie Rose, “the most prepared” actor alive.
None of this is to say there can’t be problems with Day-Lewis’ approach. In the heyday of modern American acting, when Stanislavski was all the rage and Strasberg was the king of the acting teachers, a former colleague of Strasberg’s named Robert Lewis sold out a theater for multiple nights delivering a series of lectures called “Method—or Madness?” Lewis, who was a Stanislavksi devotee, but also a lover of opera and a firm believer in style, had much to say about the problems caused by the new vogue for inner truth. Two of his warnings turned out to be especially prophetic. One is that the emphasis on big moments in acting class leaves actors incapable of doing the basic, everyday actions that make up 80 percent of playing a role—pouring water from pitchers, walking across a room, opening and closing doors, looking at and listening to another person, and so on. The other is that there was a swiftly developing fetishization of pain among young actors. The greatest mark of truth was being able to cry. The only parts of the human condition people felt like assaying were the worst ones. Actors were becoming so trained in going to extremes, it was all they could go to. I thought about Robert Lewis’ arguments while watching Anemone. Ronan Day-Lewis has the chops for an incredible career, but like many young directors, he hasn’t quite figured out when to rein it in. When Ray does anything, from drinking a glass of whiskey to sharpening a chain saw, he does it with the precision and focus of a samurai cleaning his blade. And although there are glimpses of humor within the film, it is a movie that believes that depth and misery are equivalent.
Now that Day-Lewis’ hiatus may be coming to an end, I can’t help but hope for a new looseness in his performances. What would it mean for the most intense of actors to give himself the freedom to show us not just private torments, but secret joys? This was the direction it seemed he was heading in with Phantom Thread, a stealth romantic comedy, but one in which he played a character even more uptight and controlled than he had in A Room With a View. The joy of that film was witnessing both Paul Thomas Anderson and Day-Lewis commiting themselves utterly and unabashedly to material that was so slight. With One Battle After Another, Anderson has found a way to reconcile the hangout comedies and big statement movies that dot his filmography into one thrilling whole. Perhaps, now that Day-Lewis is back, he can find a way to do something similar. Having climbed many of acting’s highest peaks, it turns out the unmapped terrains for Day-Lewis are the foothills, the cobblestone streets, and the wooded parks of his craft.
Were this to happen, it would take advantage of a little-recognized part of Day-Lewis’ work, one all the legends about him tend to ignore: The man is hilarious. Everyone I spoke to mentioned his wry wit, and that, although he takes the work seriously, he is far less precious about himself. During Last of the Mohicans, he and co-star Madeleine Stowe played escalating practical jokes on each other, culminating in Day-Lewis staging a phony road accident complete with fake blood. Sally Field told reporters that, while Day-Lewis asked to be spoken to as his character in Lincoln, he also texted her dirty limericks signed “Yours, A.” Reynolds Woodcock, the name of Day-Lewis’ character in Phantom Thread, originated as a dick joke between the actor and his writer-director. And as scary as Bill the Butcher and Daniel Plainview are, they are also characters who could only be realized by an actor with a sense of humor.
The celebrated and much-memed “I drink your milkshake” scene, for example, is a stand-up routine turned nightmarish. It is the moment of comeuppance for Paul Dano’s Eli, who, while far less malevolent than Plainview, is far more hateful to us because he is a hypocrite. The clear relish that Plainview takes in spelling out for Eli what we already know—that the oil under Eli’s land was revealed to Plainview long ago by his brother, and that Plainview has already stolen it—is made all the more delightful by the way Day-Lewis toys with Dano throughout. Instead of being a simple rant, Day-Lewis turns it into a roast, riffing on how Eli is “afterbirth” that should have been displayed in a jar instead of allowed to grow up. When he finally lets forth and explodes into the grander scale we are all expecting, it is on the rather funny-sounding non sequitur “DRAINAGE!,” after which he, like an enraged kindergarten teacher, uses a childish metaphor to pantomime how he stole all of Eli’s wealth. This sense of perverse humor, this imbuing of the serious with the comic and vice versa, is as much a part of what makes Day-Lewis so special as any behind-the-scenes legends. And as long as he continues to turn his curiosity on not just our traumas but our absurdities, I’ll continue to drink it up.