How Phantom Thread’s Lesley Manville and Daniel Day-Lewis Forged a Brother-Sister Bond by Text Message

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Over the past four decades, Lesley Manville has established herself as a well-respected stage and screen actress in England—notably winning a 2014 Olivier Award (the British equivalent of the Tony) for her performance in Ibsen’s Ghosts, and acclaim for her many collaborations with filmmaker Mike Leigh. Yet, last year, when one of Hollywood’s premier filmmakers suddenly came calling, Manville was skeptical.

Paul Thomas Anderson was seeking out Manville for a key role in Phantom Thread, his 1950s-set thriller about a fastidious fashion designer, named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose creative flow is upset by a spirited interloper (Vicky Krieps). Day-Lewis, who had never met Manville but was a fan of her work, suggested the actress to play his on-screen sister, business partner, and roommate, Cyril, with whom Reynolds has a deeply co-dependent relationship.

By the time Anderson got in touch with Manville, he essentially said, “‘Look, I’ve got this script that I’ve written and [Day-Lewis] is going to be in it. I’m going to send it to you. If you want it, it’s yours,’” Manville told Vanity Fair. “I thought, ‘Has he rung the wrong Lesley or something? Surely it can’t be this easy to attract Hollywood.’”

Once Manville signed on to the project, she began her research of couture fashion in the 1950s—poring over books that Day-Lewis and Anderson had suggested, including The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World, which is a biography of the designer Cristóbal Balenciaga on whom Woodcock is partially based.

“Quite a few of the designers in that period worked with female members of their family very closely,” said Manville of Cyril and Reynolds’s relationship. “It really wasn’t uncommon. These days it doesn’t happen as much, aside from Gianni and Donatella Versace.”

The trickiest aspect of character preparation for Manville was developing the kind of off-camera ease with Day-Lewis that would inform Reynolds and Cyril’s interconnectedness on screen—so potent they often communicate with a look or gesture rather than dialogue. In fact, some of the film’s funniest moments arrive courtesy of a well-timed expression from Manville’s character.

“For Cyril and Reynolds, they have the kind of relationship where they are absolutely easy with each other and nobody has to talk,” explained Manville. “They can have breakfast very happily together without conversation. They know each other better than anyone else in the world and respect each other. Cyril knows absolutely what Reynolds’s needs are. She knows exactly when he’s beginning to get bored with a girlfriend and they need to leave. It’s a very co-dependent, intriguing relationship. Most siblings, when they get older, go their separate ways to some degree; but these two are not only working together every day, they’re also living together. They’re going out to dinner together every night. Poor Alma (Krieps) has to come in and kind of desperately claim a place to have time with this man without Cyril hanging around all the time.”

To find that ease, Manville said, “It wasn’t a conscious thing, but over the six months before filming, [Day-Lewis and I] just became friends.”

Because Manville lives in London and Day-Lewis was traveling between his homes in New York and Ireland, the two actors only met in person about two or three times before filming. The majority of their conversations occurred by phone call or text exchange (Manville said Day-Lewis does not use emojis—we asked) and encompassed every subject, from their characters’ family history, which they fleshed out, to everyday observations.

“We just let our friendship take us into all sorts of areas of conversation—sometimes funny, sometimes cheeky, sometimes heartfelt,” Manville said. “We just got to know each other. I guess we then relocated that to work with all sorts of other different restrictions and parameters.”

Though Day-Lewis’s reputation precedes him—as an intensely method actor who stays in character through the entirety of filming—Manville said that she was not intimidated by her Academy Award-winning co-star.

“He works the way he works. I have all respect for that, in the same way that he has respect for how I work,” said Manville. “I honestly think whatever an actor needs to get them to the end results that they are seeking is fair game. I wouldn’t want to take my characters home with me, personally. But everyone works differently.”

The meticulous costume fittings also helped inform Cyril, said the actress.

“I had many, many, many, many costume fittings . . . every week for five hours each,” she said. “[Costume designer Mark Bridges] had a lot of vintage clothes that were picked up from Rome and Paris and London and New York. We were trying all these clothes on and I thought, ‘Oh, well, these clothes are great.’ Little did I know he was only trying things on to see what shapes worked on me and what suited me. But everything I wear in this film was made for me couture. Everything was made beautifully.”

Naturally, she started channeling the mindset of someone who values fashion enough to undergo such time-intensive fittings: “It informs the pride that she takes in how she looks. I loved the fact that when they went to dinner in the evenings at their restaurant they changed their clothes.”

For the practically minded Manville, the meticulously crafted costumes sometimes seemed wasted. “A lot of the time I’m just sitting at the dinner table and you can only see the top of [my costume],” she said. “I kind of went, ‘Oh, my God! It’s such a waste. All those hours of fitting and all the care and attention that’s gone into it, you never get to see the bottom half of it.’”

Given how important fashion is to the film, it seems appropriate that Anderson offered Manville a couture parting gift.

“Paul very kindly said to me at the end of filming that he wanted me to keep something. I have chosen a really lovely evening coat that I wore fleetingly in one scene,” laughed Manville. “I loved the dresses and I loved the suits, but they do say 1950s very loudly, whereas this coat I could actually rock on a red carpet in 2018 for sure.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair’s website.

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