Gabriel Day-Lewis: model, musician and tortured soul

He hails from an illustrious creative dynasty, but life hasn’t always been smooth for Gabriel Day-Lewis. He opens up to Hermione Eyre about hitting rock bottom, turning his torment into music — and catching Karl Lagerfeld’s eye
The son rises: Gabriel Day-Lewis
Hermione Eyre16 October 2015

Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis is sitting opposite me, his eyes blazing, lips pillowy. It’s impossible to look at him and not think of his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, who holds a world record of three Oscars for Best Actor, and his mother, Isabelle Adjani, who holds a world record of five César awards for Best Actress. They are the best in their fields, and both are legendarily otherworldly and enigmatic. It is quite an inheritance.

‘It’s some baggage,’ agrees Day-Lewis in his soft American accent with occasional Irish inflexions. ‘Tell me about it. I’m very proud of who my parents are, but they really set a bar and cast an immense shadow. It’s made it hard for me to find myself.’ Later he cries out, with real pain in his voice: ‘Hey, I’m ME, I’m not my parents’ child!’ He frequently says the same thing on social media. To me he bursts out: ‘I’m a human being!’ — which is touching, if unnecessary.

Lemaire long jacket, £740, Louis Vuitton shirt, POA

God save the children of famous people. They have great genes, great homes, great chances in life, but they often seem so sad. Gabriel is in demand as a model and is building a career in music, but you can see he hasn’t had an easy time — his pain is literally etched on to his skin. When I meet him he’s wearing a Henson knuckle-duster with the inscription ‘sauvage’ plus the earrings and rings, as well as a pendant of a healing crystal set in a bullet case, which is, like, deep. And then we come to his tattoos. ‘They tell my story,’ he says, starting by showing me his forearm, which is covered with the New York skyline, at night and during the day. ‘And this says “mon âme”, which means “my soul”…’ He yanks down his shirt to show me the AA’s Serenity Prayer in its entirety over his clavicle. That must have hurt. ‘The ribs and elbow were the worst. But I get a bit of a rush when I get ink.’ Across his chest, there sails a ship in a storm with the words ‘Forever Strong’. ‘That’s about being able to get through it all.’

At the grand old age of 20, Day-Lewis has the air of a survivor. He says he hit ‘rock bottom’ in 2013 (of which more later) and has since turned himself around. Nowadays, thanks to modelling, he is ‘financially independent’, paying his own rent for his studio apartments, one in New York and one in the same block as his mother in Paris.

He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke and works out five days a week. When we meet for dinner at Boundary in Shoreditch — my choice, as he says he doesn’t know London well — he orders water and carb-free chicken skewers and oeuf aux lardons. I suggest he’s got to stay skinny for modelling, but he says no, he just wants to feel fit, surprising me with a little speech about nutrition: ‘Humans aren’t made to eat processed food. Processed foods are man-made. We’re meant to eat meats and things that come from the earth, the ground, you know?’

He means to make a career out of music (hence the treble clef tattoo on his finger) and recently dropped out of his songwriting course at Berklee College of Music in Boston after one semester, in order to write full-time. ‘I’ve always been a good student, but I found it hard to handle the workload. It was a very competitive vocational environment and extremely stressful. I had to study ear-training, theory, composition, music technology, harmony… it was just a waste of my dad’s money. I’m more of a hands-on learner.’ Instead, he focused on writing his own EP, out next year, entitled Every Scar is a Healing Place. The first single has a catchy hook and breathy vocals, and was influenced, he says, by Ed Sheeran and Arcade Fire. It’s called ‘Ink in My Veins’ (free to download on SoundCloud), referencing his tattoos as well as his artsy lineage. His angst shimmers through a feelgood melody: ‘Beautiful ink is flowing through my veins/ And it takes away the pain…’

‘I transgress a lot of my turmoil into my music,’ he says. I think he means transmute, but I don’t want to stop his flow. ‘It’s highly therapeutic for me and it makes me feel a lot better. This song is about being stuck for inspiration and making that your inspiration.’ He was blocked, wanting to write, hanging out with his cat Queen S’mores (named after the US campfire snack she resembles, made of marshmallow, Nutella and peanut butter). ‘And then the song just flowed and there it is.’ Sam Smith has given him the thumbs-up. ‘He’s awesome. I really like him. He’s been very kind to me about my work as well.’

The idea of ink in his veins doesn’t thrill everyone. ‘My mother, for example.

Paul Smith overcoat, £1,149. Topman rollneck, £38. Acne Studios sweater, at mrporter.com, £220

She’s the number one candidate for not understanding my tattoos. It’s not easy. When we get a picture together she’s like: “Can you roll down your sleeves?” ’ He laughs. ‘She blames my dad, who’s covered in them. It doesn’t bother him.’ Would he cover them up for modelling? ‘No, I would just say “No thank you” to the job. I’ve heard talk about how some clients think tattoos are going out of fashion and they don’t want people with tattoos any more. Well, if a client doesn’t want me as I am, I don’t want to be a part of their campaign. I’m not a Ken doll, I’m not a pretty face. I’m a person!’

Day-Lewis has previously said that he found out about his parents’ relationship from reading the newspapers. They were together for six years, but finally separated when Adjani was pregnant. Adjani — one of the most acclaimed French actresses of her generation, who has had three Oscar nominations as well as her five Césars — was alone in New York for the birth of Gabriel, later alleging that Daniel Day-Lewis was with his new girlfriend, Julia Roberts (although some reports suggest that he did make it to the hospital later). Adjani encouraged her son to get to know his father, saying in 1996: ‘I will protect his image and keep channels open so love can grow between them.’

‘I lived in Paris with my mom until I was 14 and then I moved to Ireland to live with my father,’ he says. He commemorated the move in a tattoo of his own design that shows bricks peeping out of an open wound — ‘to represent urbanisation within rurality’. His new home was in County Wicklow, with his stepmother Rebecca Miller, the writer who is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, just to add another luminary to Day-Lewis’ family tree, and two younger stepbrothers, Ronan, 17, and Cashel, 13. He went to a local school and played rugby. It sounds like he was happy. ‘On Christmas Eve, my dad always reads the poem The Christmas Tree’ — by his father, the late poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis — ‘my younger brothers and I always tuck up in bed together to listen to him reading it to us.’

Then he started to get into writing music. ‘We were 45 minutes from the nearest town so I spent a lot of time in my room, writing. We had a grand piano, and my father and my stepmum were really supportive. Well, they were iffy at first, but then they saw I was committed to it. But things weren’t handed to me on a silver platter. I had to earn my parents’ respect for what I did.’

He enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, a private liberal arts college in New York, which is where things started to unravel. ‘I was going through a real crisis, although I didn’t know it at the time.’ He made a druggy rap video, Green Auras, which went briefly viral because it was amusing to see this 18-year-old posing as a big bad rapper smoking what appeared to be blunts on camera. Memorably, his lyrics rhymed Gabe Day-Lewis with ‘I’m about to Gabe Day-lose it’.

‘Yeah,’ he says, looking down. ‘That was a learning experience.’ Was it leaked? ‘No. It was a cry for help. No one was there to guide me. Unfortunately I was in the public eye and I handed the press a stick to beat me with.’ He received a lot of comments: negative, positive, supportive, jeering. ‘I astounded myself with how well I bounced back. I was very resilient,’ he says. ‘Now I know how to deal with spiteful press emotionally.’

Does he still get abuse online? ‘All the time. I delete a lot. I just don’t like people when they’re rude: “Your shit sucks.” I take criticism quite well, as long as it’s not malicious. But so many people post on my Instagram trying to get a rise out of me.’ He is practised in the art of not answering back. ‘It’s just schadenfreude — people taking pleasure out of other people’s misery.’

Or maybe it’s plain old envy. Modelling as a career took off for him last year when he was walking past the Chanel atelier in Paris and accidentally bumped into Karl Lagerfeld. Accidentally on purpose? ‘No!’ he protests. ‘That’s not me. I was just passing. I got to know Karl when I was a kid because he was a friend of my mother’s. We spent a week at his house in Biarritz when I was nine or ten. I remember him as very eccentric. He gave me an iPod and had his DJ do a personal playlist for it. My mom recently told me something else about that week. Apparently I asked him how much his projector cost and he said, “You should never ask about prices, it’s vulgar!” My mother said I was super-intimidated by that. I guess I wasn’t used to people talking to me that way.’

Lagerfeld didn’t recognise Day-Lewis at first. ‘I’d just dyed my hair peroxide. But then he said, “Oh my God, you look so good, I saw you in an editorial shoot. You should be in our show!” ’ Within hours, he was signed. That was how Day-Lewis came to escort Julianne Moore into the casino-themed Chanel catwalk show, where stars including Lara Stone, Kristen Stewart and Rita Ora gathered alongside celebrity progeny Lily Collins, daughter of Phil, and Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Vanessa Paradis and Johnny Depp, to play roulette and blackjack.

His girlfriend, Elise Mascia, also a part-time model, was in the audience, but he doesn’t wish to talk about her. ‘I’d like to keep her out of the press as much as possible. We’ve been together about a year. At the Chanel show the paparazzi were there and I asked her to leave before me so we weren’t photographed together. I’m like my dad in that respect. There is nothing he likes less than having to expose his family to his fame.’Daniel Day-Lewis, who has made only four films in the past decade, and practises carpentry and stone masonry, is frequently described as reclusive. ‘He’s been amazing in terms of sheltering us from all that [the press]. There’s nothing more important to him than his privacy and that of his family. Both my parents have low profiles. They don’t want it known where they are. I am very fortunate not to have a Brangelina set-up, Jesus Christ! I don’t know how those kids cope… It’s so intrusive. I would hate it. Some celebrities love it, that’s what they thrive off. They’re a separate breed. Are they human? Right? They can’t be. There’s no way…

Wooyoungmi coat, at mrporter.com, £1,135 Prada jacket, £1,500, shirt, £360, and trousers, £480

‘I’m no stranger to fame,’ he continues. ‘I grew up in a setting where fame is a common theme. Fame is not something I’m looking to acquire. It has more cons than pros. The only asset it brings is getting to do more work and being able to share it with those who want to follow your work.’ He’s a careful composer of captions on Instagram, translating them into French and English, giving thanks and credit to his friends and supporters. ‘People might think I’m trying too hard, but that’s me. My dad’s a very humble, gracious man. I take after him in that respect. It sounds immodest to say I’m humble, maybe…’

What does he take from having witnessed his father’s method approach to acting? Daniel Day-Lewis legendarily ‘becomes’ his characters while he is acting, answering to their name and so forth. ‘Obviously there’s no such thing as method music, but I’ve inherited the way he values his work. I take my work seriously and I don’t half-ass it; I’m very emotionally invested.’ He’s willing to make himself vulnerable through his lyrics? ‘All art is about giving a piece of yourself. There is no art without vulnerability.’

This summer Day-Lewis lost two of his friends (one was Ian Jones, also a model and the boyfriend of Tali Lennox, Annie Lennox’s daughter), who both drowned in unrelated accidents during the same week. ‘They were both very loved. I got a tattoo saying “If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever”. They inspired me to write a very beautiful song. I have that to thank them for.’

I leave him heading for Claridge’s, missing his cat and hoping to get back to his keyboard soon. ‘I said to a French magazine: “Je n’ai pas le droit d’erreur,” ’ he says as we part. ‘I don’t have the right to make a mistake. That’s it. I only have one shot at this. But I’m an Aries. I go head-on, horns to the fore.’

Gabriel Day-Lewis (Instagram @gabrieldaylewis) is represented by IMG Models. Portraits by Tomo Brejc, styled by Anish Patel

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in