Given that Mr. Day-Lewis has announced, at 60, that this will be his last performance — despite having won the Academy Award for best actor twice over the last decade (bringing his total wins in the male category to a record-setting three) — he was a convincing messenger.

“We can’t begin to know,” why people make the decisions they make, he said in a hotel parlor in Lower Manhattan, leaning forward on an embroidered sofa in crisp jeans and a striped sweater, “but it works for them.”

In conversation, Mr. Day-Lewis speaks in a measured, halting cadence with a delicate, slightly hoarse tone that would shame the most impudent interlocutor into silence. The effect is simultaneously dominant and recessive, like a mountain made of glass.

He is once again the subject of awards buzz this season — and was nominated for a Golden Globe — for his performance in “Phantom Thread” as the fictional designer Reynolds Woodcock. If the film is more precise in scope than Mr. Day-Lewis’s most recent vessels, including Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and “There Will Be Blood” with Mr. Anderson, the role is no less indelible — a searing and unexpectedly comic portrait of corrosive genius.

On a recent morning in December, Mr. Day-Lewis and the film’s other stars — the British actress Lesley Manville, who appears as Reynolds’s imperious sister and business manager, Cyril; and the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, who plays Alma, the designer’s headstrong muse and love interest — were gathered to discuss the film as a trio for the first time without Mr. Anderson present. (Several weeks later, Mr. Day-Lewis, Ms. Manville, the director and the film would land Oscar nominations.)