IN 1976, WHEN HE WAS 19, Daniel Day-Lewis, who is British and was trained in the grand theatrical tradition of Shakespeare and the classics, saw “Taxi Driver” and, despite the considerable weight and seeming obligation of his heritage, realized that what he longed to be was an American actor. “It was a real illumination,” Day-Lewis told me late in August as he sat at the rough wood dining table of a duplex apartment in downtown Manhattan, where he and his wife, Rebecca Miller, and their two boys stay when in New York. “I saw ‘Taxi Driver’ five or six times in the first week, and I was astonished by its sheer visceral beauty. I just kept going back — I didn’t know America, but that was a glimpse of what America might be, and I realized that, contrary to expectation, I wanted to tell American stories.” It was raining hard outside, and Day-Lewis, who has the look of an elegant vagabond, was wearing clothes seemingly chosen many years ago for their utility and subtle details. His loose denim jeans were worn soft and white by use and the once-vibrant red plaid of his shirt had aged into a warm maroon. Day-Lewis is tall and lean and has tattoos circling his lower arms and the permanently inked handprints of his and Miller’s two sons climbing up his body to his shoulders. There were gold loops in each earlobe, and although he had left his sturdy, beat-up leather work boots outside the front door and was padding around in his socks, Day-Lewis still had a kind-of-jaunty porkpie hat on his head. The hat covered his long black hair and set off the contours of his face, which is dominated by his noble, bashed nose.

“Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies,” Day-Lewis continued, as he ate a chicken-salad sandwich. “We were all encouraged to believe that the classics of the theater were the fiery hoops through which you’d have to pass if you were going to have any self-esteem as a performer. It never occurred to me that that was the case. One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies. I’m glad I did the classical work that I did, but it just wasn’t for me. I’m a little bit perverse, and I just hate doing the thing that’s the most obvious.”

Day-Lewis laughed and drank some grapefruit juice. While he may appear a bit rough, his demeanor is courtly. You have to possess something utterly to push it away, and whether it’s his extreme good looks, which he obscures beneath the trappings of a bohemian pirate, or his cultured background, which he disparages, Day-Lewis has an intense attraction to the opposite of whatever he came by easily. He is particularly compelled by the idea of spontaneity, but there is nothing sloppy or haphazard about him, and that lends Day-Lewis, despite his careworn clothes, a quality of grace. He is most voluble and passionate on the subject of film. He loves even bad movies and likes to analyze the work of actors past and present. Day-Lewis reveres the greats — Brando, DeNiro — but he is intrigued by all kinds of performances. He dislikes John Wayne, loves Gary Cooper, prefers the Jimmy Stewart of Capra’s classic pictures to the Stewart of Anthony Mann’s westerns and is fascinated by Clint Eastwood. “I used to go to all-night screenings of his movies,” Day-Lewis recalled. “I’d stagger out at 5 in the morning, trying to be loose-limbed and mean and taciturn.” He paused. “My love for American movies was like a secret that I carried around with me. I always knew I could straddle different worlds. I’d grown up in two different worlds and if you can grow up in two different worlds, you can occupy four. Or six. Why put a limit on it?”

Since 1992, when he deftly navigated two identities as Hawkeye, the heroic white frontiersman raised as a Native American, in “Last of the Mohicans,” Day-Lewis has played many Americans. If Martin Scorsese, who is, of course, the director of “Taxi Driver,” had not been the one to approach him about the role of the vaguely Eurocentric Newland Archer in “The Age of Innocence,” he would have turned it down. “Too English,” Day-Lewis explained. “I was hoping he’d ask me to do something more rough-and-tumble.” When Scorsese did, with “Gangs of New York,” in 2000, Day-Lewis thrilled to the chance to play Bill the Butcher, a violent king of the city. In his latest film, “There Will Be Blood,” which opens next month and was written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, Day-Lewis portrays a man who is searching for his fortune in oil in turn-of-the-century California. The character is loosely based on Edward Doheny, who started out as an itinerant prospector looking for gold and silver and became the millionaire who headed the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. “There Will Be Blood” is about the lure of the West, the intoxicating sense of freedom and opportunity that can be found in new lands and the costs of huge and sudden success. There are shades of current politics in the film — the oil and the greed still resonate — but it is, mostly, a “Citizen Kane”-esque character study about the corrupting desire for power and riches. The tale it tells is, in many ways, a story about what is right, and wrong, with America.