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Daniel Day-Lewis’s method acting routinely shows the importance of voice in media.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, publicising the recently released There Will Be Blood, British actor Daniel Day-Lewis described the process of finding the voice of his character of Daniel Plainview: “I like to kid myself into thinking that I can hear that voice before I try and make the sound of it […] It begins with hearing it.” Since breaking onto the scene in the 1980s, the three-time Oscar-winner has risen to prominence as one of the most celebrated character actors in contemporary cinema. Beyond the brilliance of his on-screen roles, the preparations Day-Lewis undergoes for his roles have become the stuff of legend. As his interviews show, this begins with the vocal work from which springs his characters’ dimensions.
Looking Back: 1985
Since his first speaking role in 1982’s Gandhi where he delivers a few lines in well-pitched Afrikaans, Day-Lewis has cultivated a filmography of singular variety – not just for his unparalleled range of his physical transformations, but also his voice. He has embodied everything from Irish to three strands of periodic East Coast in The Age of Innocence, The Last of the Mohicans and The Crucible, as well as accents from a plethora of British regions, including what I call the ‘London trilogy.’ In these three (two of which are 40 years old this year), he captures different types of London accents in different milieus.
In A Room with a View and Phantom Thread, his accents reflect an upper-class upbringing in the 1900s and 1950s respectively; in My Beautiful Laundrette, his working-class accent reflects the film’s South London setting. More striking than the accuracy of these accents are the discrepancies in tone and diction, and how these inform his physical choices. His delivery is more precise and heightened as Cecil Vyse, which manifests clearly in the cartoonish rigidity of his body language. Compare this to Johnny Burfoot, whose posture matches the everyman credibility of his cadence and dialect.
Dialect & Delivery
Day-Lewis’ accents have been commended by dialect coaches such as Erik Singer, who observes that the vintage New York accent he developed for Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York “walks the line brilliantly” between historical accuracy and something tangible for us today. The Butcher’s dialect draws on several elements of modern-day New York, including nasality and extenuated T-sounds, where the actor’s tongue hits the back of their front teeth: precise and authentic. To me, There Will Be Blood suggests the mark of a great Day-Lewis film is when the performance does not stand out drastically within the film itself, but rather seeps into the wider mise-en-scene. Daniel Plainview is as virtuosic and colossal a performance as There Will Be Blood is a film.
Conversely, the two films that celebrate their fortieth birthday in 2025, Room and Laundrette, exhibit two of Day-Lewis’ quieter roles, despite the outrageous details which define the dandified former. Laundrette showcases Day-Lewis’ ability to play with silence – the mark of a seasoned vocal performer. This emerges as an early example of the nuanced ways in which Day-Lewis utilises rhythm in his delivery to create meaning, and how voice propels intention in physicality.
The celebrated baptism scene in There Will Be Blood is a complex later example where the character’s inner world is dredged to the forefront by the pace with which he approaches two topics. He rushes ferociously through the religious jargon, marginalising it, then decelerates to a savage still at the mention of personal fault (“I have abandoned my child…”), raising the stakes of the scene and capitalising on subtext. Day-Lewis’ movements, such as a slow look up are largely dictated by the pace with which he conducts his speech.
‘A Fingerprint of the Soul’
Take Lincoln (2012). As Oprah succinctly put in an interview with Day-Lewis and Steven Spielberg, the voice of Lincoln was what immediately stuck out to audiences, whether due to whiplash as its surprising high pitch, diverging from commonplace impressions of the 16th US President, or out of awe for Day-Lewis’ fealty to the facts. His process involves extensive research, including historical documents about Lincoln’s attributes: Plainview, where his imagination runs freer, are similar – involving research into historical dialects from Oklahoma and Fon Du Lac. His method always starts with voice, which he described as “a deep personal reflection of character […] a fingerprint of the soul.”
Yet, in all of Day-Lewis’ career, no performance is more immediately impressive as a transformation, but simultaneously nuanced, quiet, and layered, as Christy Brown in My Left Foot.
It was in this role that he meticulously constructed a biomechanical masterclass which begins with voice work – as Brown was a real-life artist who could only move his left foot.
A performance rooted in fixity and stasis, his speech is one of the few instruments of expression he has, so the voice elevates from the centre of Day-Lewis’ preparation to the epicentre of the character itself. His voice guides the movements of the central character, through which Christy Brown takes flight. If one film exemplifies his talent, method, and the interrelationship between vocal craft and physicality, it is this one, which sets the precedent for what to expect from a Day-Lewis performance.
Looking Forward: 2025
This precedent persists with Anemone, Day-Lewis’ return to screen acting after another temporary ‘retirement’ – the first since 2017’s Phantom Thread. From trailers and official clips, we can gather his vocal performance will veer towards the restrained and subtle, the character being an introverted hermit of Yorkshire origin – a dialect he has not yet tackled. Although released to a lukewarm critical response in the US, we can expect a standout central performance from Day-Lewis – including a nuanced vocal transformation. This makes Anemone one of the year’s must see films.
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