On Tuesday, about five years after last appearing onscreen, Daniel Day-Lewis confirmed through a representative that he has quit acting—one of the most random, unprompted Hollywood declarations in recent memory. Day-Lewis, who is the only person in history to win three best-actor Oscars, has wrapped production on another film—the upcoming Paul Thomas Anderson drama Phantom Thread—and plans to fulfill all promotional obligations on said film, which arrives in theaters this Christmas, before retreating back to. . . wherever it is that Day-Lewis retreats.

“Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor,” the actor’s representative Leslee Dart told Variety on Tuesday. “He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.”

If this news of Day-Lewis’s retirement has elicited an unexpected, Daniel Plainview-style There Will Be Blood ugly cry, know that this is not the first time that the famously reclusive and immensely selective actor has threatened to quit in his four-decade career. In fact, the eccentric actor has attempted retirement in fittingly eccentric fashions several times before. To wit:

In 1989, Day-Lewis quit stage acting. . .while still onstage during a performance of Hamlet at the National Theatre. The story goes that Day-Lewis got to the scene where the Shakespeare character speaks to his father’s ghost before inexplicably collapsing into sobs and walking off—never to appear onstage again. (Imagine, for a second, that this had happened in the camera-phone age.) The reported rationale: Day-Lewis was such an effective method actor that he somehow managed to summon his own father’s ghost on that very stage. Day-Lewis has since clarified—or further confused the public—by telling Time in 2012, “[T]o some extent I probably saw my father’s ghost every night, because of course if you’re working in a play like Hamlet, you explore everything through your own experience. . .So yes, of course, it was communication with my own dead father.”

In the late 90s, after filming 1997’s Jim Sheridan drama The Boxer, Day-Lewis went off-the-grid for a five-year period during which time the actor took up woodworking and shoemaking, even apprenticing for 10 months under the late Italian shoemaker Stefano Bemer. (The official Stefano Bemer Web site now boasts this trivia note as free P.R., explaining, “What many do not know is what brought them together: perfectionism. . .DD Lewis and Stefano shared the same passion for their respective forms of art.”)

Five years later, when Day-Lewis re-emerged to begin work on Martin Scorsese’s 2002 drama The Gangs of New York, the actor threw himself into similarly old-world crafts to prepare to play his character—an 1860s gang leader—by apprenticing as a butcher and hiring circus performers to teach him how to throw knives.

After filming, though, Day-Lewis retreated again, and attempted to explain the rational behind his exhaustive, immersive, all-in-or-all-out cycle of method acting: “As an actor you learn, you learn; you shoot and shoot for a long time; and then you're dog meat,” the actor said, according to a 2002 article in The Irish Times titled “Actor Daniel Day-Lewis Quits Film Business.” He continued, “And then you realize that you learned nothing. And that’s a difficult thing to live with.”

A decade later, in 2013—after more of these Day-Lewis method-moratorium-on-acting phases, and shortly after winning an Oscar for Lincoln—the London Sunday Times reported that Day-Lewis was again planning an acting break. He told friends that he was taking a five-year sabbatical so that he could spend time with family on his farm in County Wicklow, Ireland and learn “rural skills” like stonemasonry.