CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)
By:
October 13, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER
“Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.” —Konstantin Stanislavski
Famously, Daniel Day-Lewis disappeared from public life in 1997 and didn’t resurface until 2002, as Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. When I heard he’d spent those years in Florence, Italy, apprenticing under a master shoemaker, learning the craft and eventually becoming an expert shoemaker himself, I was delighted. It was such a perfect illustration of his eccentricity — which I understood as the kookiness of the method actor, only bigger.
Here are some of the things Daniel Day-Lewis has done to prepare for a role: learned to make a birch-bark canoe, sewn an accurate reproduction of a Balenciaga dress by hand, built a replica 17th-century house using 17th-century tools, broken his own nose, provoked brawls on the streets of Rome, given up bathing for ten weeks, walked around Manhattan for two months sporting a top hat and cane, survived for six months on food he killed, skinned, and butchered himself, stayed in a wheelchair for a year, and had himself locked up in solitary confinement in an actual prison, where real-life screws realistically abused and spat upon him.
He is a genius, a wizard, a world heritage site, and I deeply respect the fact that he learned Czech for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a film in which no Czech is spoken. There’s something profound and generous about the lengths to which he goes in creating inner lives for his characters. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the selfishness of, say, making the crew drag him around the set of My Left Foot. Sure, he broke a few ribs in the process, but the self-abnegation is itself off-putting. Look what I suffer for you! Well, who asked? And what about the PAs who had to spoon-feed him? So there was an edge to my amusement about the fact that Daniel Day-Lewis is an expert cobbler — something along the lines of “Isn’t that a bit much?”
And yet the image of the great actor at his rustic bench with his awls and hammers and tranchets, patiently working a piece of leather, stirred something within.
Charlie Rose is prodding Daniel Day-Lewis, who is on the show promoting There Will Be Blood. Isn’t it true, Rose says, that he has something in common with Daniel Plainfield, the ruthless oilman? The question is rhetorical. The thing they share, Rose announces, is that they both have a Fever — for Oil in Plainfield’s case, and with Day-Lewis, it’s Acting.
Daniel Day-Lewis flinches. “I don’t think the fever is for acting.”
Rose leans forward greedily. “Then what would it be?”
“The idea of exploring the world with an entirely different experience to your own, which doesn’t automatically mean that you have to make a film or create a piece of theater to do that.”
That’s what stirs me about his lost years as a shoemaker: He wasn’t doing it for a part. He was living out a counterfactual dream, the kind you might have, that collapses under the weight of relationships and obligations, only to reassert itself in unguarded moments. To escape to another country, to join the circus, to live on an island in Penobscot Bay, to run off with your one true love.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | TBD on TBD | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!