Daniel Plainview

There Will Be Blood

Played by Daniel Day-Lewis

Lone wolf prospector and enterprising oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) starts out with good intentions, adopting the infant son of an employee killed on the job and raising him as his own. Little H.W. (Dillon Freasier) even becomes Plainview’s “partner” of sorts, the pair teaming up to buy land from desperate town folk as a father-and-son enterprise. Then again, using your child to promote your own business isn’t the most moral of parenting endeavors; neither is it very responsible to leave him unattended on a mining site, where a chance accident could leave him deaf for life. Though Plainview tries his best, the life of a ruthless businessman isn’t most conducive to fostering healthy relationships, and by the time a grown H.W. comes asking for fatherly release, all he gets from his bitter old man is a painful disowning.