Daniel Day-Lewis & 9 Other Actors Who Came Out Of Retirement For The Perfect Role

Michael Corleone said it best in The Godfather Part III, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Actors will always be actors, and dangling a meaty role in front of them is like dangling a piece of string in front of a cat.

There are tons of actors who have announced their retirement, and so many of them have come out of retirement. Sometimes they’ll come out of retirement years later after they’ve been begged by a certain director, and other times, actors will snap up another role almost days after announcing they’re done for good.

10 Daniel Day-Lewis

Before starring in Phantom Thread and playing one of the most memorable characters in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Daniel Day-Lewis worked with Scorsese on the epic Gangs of New York. Day-Lewis played the now iconic Bill The Butcher, the knife-wielding gang leader with the biggest mutton chops.

But the actor had retired at that point to become a cobbler in Italy, and Scorsese reportedly even traveled to the country, just to persuade him to take the role.

9 Joe Pesci

Joe Pesci hadn’t acted in a live-action movie in almost 10 years, and there was only one filmmaker that could ever convince the actor to come out of retirement, though it wasn’t without some struggle.

Pesci reportedly turned down the role more than 50 times, but thanks to Martin Scorsese’s persistence, he reunited with De Niro on screen for The Irishman and it ended up being one of the best gangster movies of the past 15 years.

8 Rick Moranis

Honey, I Shrunk The Kids is one of those forgotten classics and one of the best Rick Moranis movies, but the property will no longer be lying dormant, as the remake, simply titled Shrunk, is currently in production.

Moranis retired from acting a long time ago and hasn’t been featured in a movie for almost 30 years, but given that the actor is the face of the series, it’d be blasphemy if he didn’t appear in some form. Thankfully, the actor agreed and he’ll be returning for the 2021 movie.

7 Anthony Hopkins

Despite being one of the greatest actors of the generation, Anthony Hopkins has a lot of negative comments to say about the profession. All the way back in 1998, the actor stated that had enough of acting and threw in the towel.

But it didn’t take Hopkins long to get bored sitting at home and he quickly got the itch to continue. In 1999, he returned by doing what he does best, by playing a creepy serial killer in the thriller movie Instinct. His latest role is opposite Olivia Colman in The Father.

6 Shia LaBeouf

It’s no secret that Shia LaBeouf is not shy of controversy, most recently landing himself in a pretty heavy lawsuit. In the early 2010s, he dove deep into performance art, whether it was putting a brown paper bag over his head at red carpet events or filming himself watching every one of his movies.

His performance art reached a pinnacle in 2013 when he announced his retirement from acting altogether. But it, again, didn’t take long for him to go back on his word and star in Fury the following year.

5  Joaquin Phoenix

Joaquin Phoenix’s retirement from acting was famously documented in I’m Still Here, the documentary directed by Casey Affleck, which was released in 2010.

The movie chronicles how Phoenix decided to give up acting so he could focus on his gangster rap career, though it ended up being more performance art than anything else and the actor was back in a lead role just two years later. The role was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, an incredible movie that’s loosely based on Scientology.

4 Liam Neeson

After having starred in literally dozens of action movies in which he has to fight for survival, whether it’s on a plane, against human traffickers in France, or against wolves in Alaska, Liam Neeson decided to give up on starring in action movies because he thought audiences would get sick of him. An action star since Sam Raimi’s Darkman, which is one of the movies that has recently turned 30 years old, he had been generally typecast as an action star.

However, not even one year later, he was back to being the struggling, fighting survivor fans know him as, and he starred in The Commuter in 2017, and many others since.

3 Emma Watson

After Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2 was released in 2011, one of the movie’s biggest stars decided to retire from acting in order to focus on higher education.

However, despite this, she has become the biggest movie star of the whole Harry Potter cast, as she has led a billion-dollar box office movie with Beauty And The Beast and worked with some of the most celebrated directors, including Sofia Coppola.

2 Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig has notoriously bit the hand that fed him, as he has had some extremely harsh things to say about the character of James Bond. When asked if he was returning to the series after Spectre, Craig said that he would rather slit his wrists.

It isn’t surprising, as fans were overly critical of the movie due to it featuring one of the worst Bond villains. But when the studio tempted him with a truckload of money, it was impossible for him to turn the role down.

1 Robert Redford

Robert Redford is one of the greatest actors of all time, with amazing movies like The Sting and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid under his belt, and he announced his retirement shortly after the completion of his last starring role in The Old Man and the Gun, in 2018. 

For the most part, the legendary actor has stuck to his guns. However, in 2019 he returned to the big screen when he reprised his role as Alexander Pierce, the head of Hydra, in Avengers: Endgame.