(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 6 December 2025 18:45, UK
Daniel Day-Lewis has worked with some pretty impressive directors throughout his career, which is easy to do when you’re one of the most heralded actors of all time.
The actor’s start on the big screen came when he was just a teen, landing an uncredited part as a vandal in Sunday Bloody Sunday. If this wasn’t an indicator of Day-Lewis having a fruitful career ahead of him, then I don’t know what was. Still, he didn’t get a proper role again until a decade later, although it was his main role in My Beautiful Laundrette, a searing time capsule of Thatcher’s Britain, that really put him on the map.
His star power quickly reached new heights as he kept proving himself to be a capable leading actor, and by 1989, he’d appeared in his first Oscar-winning performance as the disabled painter Christy Brown in My Left Foot. The role saw Day-Lewis go pretty method, earning himself a reputation as being, well, not the easiest star to work with. I mean, it’s certainly going to prove difficult working with an actor who demands to be carried and spoon-fed in the name of getting into character.
That hasn’t put people off working with Day-Lewis, though, and many directors have flocked to work with him in spite of his crazy method acting madness. One of these filmmakers he called a particular perfectionist, even though it took him a while to realise, which is quite ironic.
Few actors are as dedicated as Day-Lewis, who literally went and lived in the woods to prepare for Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. He wants every role he plays to be performed with absolute perfection, which is why he seems to be selective with the parts he takes on. Yet, he is so wrapped up in perfecting his own performances that he apparently doesn’t seem to recognise when he is confronted with a fellow obsessive.
That was the case when he worked with Martin Scorsese, who directed him in the acclaimed period drama The Age of Innocence. Adapted from Edith Wharton’s tale of high society in New York, Day-Lewis co-starred alongside Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder as Scorsese gave the period drama genre a go for the first time.
In trying out the genre, Scorsese had new challenges. He was used to setting his films in contemporary New York, but now he had to go back in time to the latter side of the 1800s, where everything from the clothing to the set design would be completely different from what he was used to.
Day-Lewis eventually realised just how important the tiniest of details became to Scorsese, who wanted his movie to be as accurate as possible. “I never sort of stood back objectively and thought, ‘This man is a perfectionist,’ but sure to God he is one,” the actor once said (via Deseret News).
Scorsese certainly didn’t mess about when it came to preparing for the movie, even hiring someone to intensively study the specific patterns of china that would’ve been used in the homes of people in the same class hierarchy. It’s almost like this was Scorsese’s own version of method acting, so it’s not hard to see why Scorsese and Day-Lewis made a suitable pair.
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