Actor Daniel Day-Lewis has condemned rising theater ticket prices and what he sees as lingering snobbery toward cinema in the U.K.
Speaking at the BFI Southbank during the London Film Festival, he said the British arts world continues to treat theater as a “superior form” while overlooking the accessibility and appeal of film.
“There’s still an elitism in this country that theater is the superior form,” he said in conversation with critic Mark Kermode, according to The Guardian.
The actor recalled that during his training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre school, students were taught to view stage acting as the professional ideal.
“Then there’s films: bit dodgy. Television: like, really? OK, you gotta pay the gas bill. That was the thinking,” he said.
He said theater audiences are often limited by price and by who feels welcome in those spaces.
“Theater essentially relies on people having had the privilege of an education that allows them to believe that they’re entitled to go to the theater,” he said.
“It’s a relatively small group of people that is available to, and that is just quite wrong.”
He said, in contrast, cinema once felt more open to everyone.
“The great thing about the cinema is that everyone could – maybe not so much these days – but everyone could buy a ticket.”
Daniel Day-Lewis has returned to the public eye for the U.K. premiere of “Anemone,” his first film in seven years.
The project marks his first collaboration with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed and co-wrote the film.
It follows his decision to step away from acting after “Phantom Thread” in 2017, when his representatives said he “will no longer be working as an actor.”
In an interview last month, the actor said he regretted announcing his retirement, telling Rolling Stone he “never intended to retire” and “would have done well to just keep [his] mouth shut.”
He described the new film as an unplanned return to filmmaking.
“It saddened me that I had perhaps ruled myself out of that when I decided to work on something else for a while,” he said in an interview alongside his son.
“As we progressed through it … it began to alarm me slightly. I understood that this was going to involve the full paraphernalia of a film production, and that wasn’t something I was eager to get back into.”
In London, Daniel Day-Lewis also addressed long-standing perceptions of his approach to acting.
“Recent commentary [about method acting] is invariably from people who have little or no understanding of what it actually involves,” he said.
“It’s almost as if it’s some specious science that we’re involved in or a cult.”
He added that the technique was simply “a way of freeing yourself” to remain spontaneous and open in performance.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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