Daniel Day-Lewis Quit Acting and Everyone Made the Same Joke
"He's a method actor, so it's probably just for a role" — everyone on Twitter.

Daniel Day-Lewis, a three-time Academy Award-winner for Best Actor, has retired. The news came as somewhat of a shock when it broke on Tuesday afternoon, but it prompted everybody on Twitter to make the same joke: He’s just preparing for a role.
Day-Lewis is, famously, a method actor. He learned to speak Czech for his role in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, confined himself to a wheelchair and demanded that the crew spoon-feed him meals during the entirety of filming My Left Foot, and insisted that everybody call him “Mr. President” on and off the set of Lincoln. So, naturally, news of his retirement got people wondering if the “retirement” was actually just the next level, cosmic-brain iteration of his method acting.
That, of course, isn’t the reason his spokesperson gave when Variety contacted her. “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” she said in a statement. “He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”
If you ask, uh, anybody on Twitter though, they’ll say he’s preparing to play a character who retires from acting in an upcoming movie.
He's just preparing for his next role in which he'll be playing a man who's not an actor https://t.co/wiS3ZDKKhN
— Andrew Ziegler (@zieg) June 20, 2017
maybe he's just preparing for a role in a movie about a guy who quits acting https://t.co/WzmVY5aIGP
— Erin 🎶Gloria🎶 Ryan (@morninggloria) June 20, 2017
Do we know for sure that Daniel Day-Lewis isn't just method acting for an upcoming role playing a recently retired actor?
— Ted Berg (@OGTedBerg) June 20, 2017
2017: Method actor Daniel Day-Lewis announces he's done acting.
— austin (@TheAHuff) June 20, 2017
2019: Day-Lewis wins Oscar for his role in a film about a retired actor.
Sorry, but you're not fooling me, Daniel. This is clearly just method work for a role about a retired actor. See you soon, Mr. Day-Lewis. pic.twitter.com/S908CmKq8w
— Justin Kirkland (@justinkirkland4) June 20, 2017
THR article: Daniel Day-Lewis is quitting acting. Sure he's not method-acting for the role of a quitting actor? https://t.co/T5gdhM8OgA
— Brian Ibbott (@Coverville) June 20, 2017
I bet Daniel Day Lewis' next movie role is an ageing method actor who decides to quit acting for good.
— Dark Bunny Tees (@DarkBunnyTees) June 20, 2017
This is great method acting training for Daniel Day-Lewis's role in the Daniel Day-Lewis biopic.
— Taylor D (@turtledovejones) June 20, 2017
Don’t get confused: Daniel Day-Lewis is just playing the role of a guy who is retiring from acting.
— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) June 20, 2017
…And on, and on, and on. To be clear, this isn’t a bad joke, it’s just kind of a low-hanging one. We can do better. Inverse editor Jordan Zakarin wanted me to be very, very clear about that, and strongly suggested that I embed his second, much-funnier tweet about Day-Lewis’s retirement in this article after dragging him for his first one. Here it is:
Daniel Day-Lewis saw Anthony Hopkins in the new Transformers movie and said “nah, I’m good"
— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin) June 20, 2017