On stage, at the Oscars in February in LA, Joaquin Phoenix quietens the crowd as if embarrassed about the fuss. He’s not a natural public speaker, but at least this is the final leg, the finish line in sight. Winning at the Baftas in London earlier in the month, he used the opportunity to call out an all-white acting shortlist by critiquing the industry’s “systemic racism”. Winning at the Golden Globes the month before, he highlighted the Australian wildfires and the need to take responsibility rather than just send well wishes (“We don’t have to take private jets to Palm Springs for the awards”).
It’s hardly his first time here. He was first nominated in 2001, for Gladiator, and he remembers how surreal and nerve-wracking it was. He kept popping out for cigarettes – a habit he took up in his teens and one that his nervousness has never let quite let him quit – and got hassled by various security guards as a result. But here, now, this time, Joaquin Phoenix – a vegan since early childhood – starts to talk about the subject closest to his heart. His voice constantly on the edge of breaking, he says we have become disconnected from the natural world, that our egocentric world-view means we feel it’s OK to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, then take her milk for our coffee and cereal. He chases each word as if each one might escape his grasp. All this is surprisingly moving, if not exactly unexpected. Finally, though, he changes tack and says something that no one saw coming.
“I have been a scoundrel all my life,” he says. “I’ve been selfish. I’ve been cruel at times, hard to work with, and I’m grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. And I think that’s when we’re at our best: when we support each other, not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes.”
Everyone knows the period he’s referring to. But it’s how he ends the speech that really surprises. He finishes with a quote from his brother, River, at which point he starts to cry. His voice wavers as he gulps the words his brother had once written: “‘Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow.’”
If you want to know what makes Phoenix special, you only need to look at his smile – but not in the way you might think.
If you saw him first, aged 20, in his breakout role as a denim-and-leather bad boy in To Die For – a part that sees him kill for Nicole Kidman’s weatherwoman and in which his opening line to camera informs us that when he thinks of the weather he now has to jack off – what was most apparent isn’t even that line, but how it arrives. The words come sideways with a smile, but it’s a pained smile, a grimace taken for a ride, and so something was immediately up. Was his character... the first 1990s bad boy with ennui? Sort of, but it soon became clear it was something more complex: what Phoenix brings to life more than any actor alive is anxiety.
It’s there even more clearly in Gladiator, the role that really launched him. Looking back, it isn’t exactly a deep part – he’s the bad guy, who’s bad – yet Phoenix brings something not on the page. Not simple villainy and not simply fear, but the nagging anxiety of never matching those before you that causes weak men to do terrible things. Look again at its most famous scene, in which Russell Crowe’s Gladiator removes his mask to reveal his true identity. What makes it powerful is the moment just before: when Crowe turns his back. “How dare you show your back to me,” barks Phoenix and, for a second, in his hurt quiver, you feel his hurt too.
Think of him in Walk The Line, the biopic about the life of Johnny Cash, which is, at its essence, about the anxiety of performance, the irony that performance is both the cause of and release from that anxiety, and the ultimate cost of it as he descends into a crippling addiction to drugs and alcohol. Picture his face when the curtain comes down in his first major show: not just shock, but almost incomprehension that anyone could ever cope with this.
It’s there in Signs, in which every Phoenix smile is a frown that hasn’t been released yet. Picture as his elder brother, played by Mel Gibson, returns home and finds him on the sofa with his nephew and niece, tinfoil hats on heads. I’m not saying it isn’t a little on the nose. Or his first appearance in The Village, jitterily clasping a piece of paper before addressing the village elders. Or his fidgety side-eyed porn jockey in 8mm. Or in Ladder 49, a smile that is forever dropping under the weight of the rest of his face, beset by eyes that restlessly shift but never find their target.
Anxiety is a complex emotion, neither quite fear nor quite dread, those binary states better suited for actors of lesser talent. But it is an almost-state of both: a disquiet, an unease. But if there’s any film that sums up Phoenix as cinema’s great anxiety artist, it can only be 2012’s The Master. Phoenix has never been afraid to either let it all hang out (witness the substantial guts he grew for everything from Irrational Man to hitman indie You Were Never Really Here), but in The Master, as he would later be in Joker, he’s gaunt and gnarled, his crooked stance – hands on hips, elbows out so wide he’s like a tightrope walker trying to keep balance – showing a man at an odd angle to the world.
He plays Freddie Quell, a hopeless sex addict and alcoholic – all he wants is release from himself (“You just can’t take this life straight, can you?” says Amy Adams to him in the film’s penultimate scene, giving as close as the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, will allow to a denouement).
Quell’s smile in The Master is almost always a bear trap. Even before he meets Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Master”, when an army psychiatrist is assessing him at the film’s start, he treats every question (“Now, what’s this about a crying episode?”) like it’s a test on his own life that he hasn’t studied for. But watch his face and you see something deeper: a smile creeps across each time and, just as quickly, it disappears, as if the smile itself were a mistake. The retraction says: what are the rules to this world again?
What Phoenix’s performance in The Master does most is imbibe this anxiety as the tone of the film itself and ask you a fundamental question about it: wouldn’t it be great to be released from it? Wouldn’t it be great to have someone to tell you the rules? But The Master was a niche film in the scheme of things: awards-bait for sure, and awards-bait that saw Phoenix duly nominated for every award going, but hardly a box office smash (in fact, despite its meagre $32 million budget, it managed to lose money). With Joker, though, Phoenix would take a film with a premise nowhere near as nuanced – the comic book antihero reimagined in a slightly less comic book world – and take that bear-trap smile mainstream.
Phoenix has always been someone who worries more than most. In part, this worry is how he became vegan.
His parents had been missionaries in Venezuela for the religious group Children Of God before they were aware it was a cult. Once they found out, they took the children – Joaquin along with siblings Rain, River and Liberty – and left on a freighter. On the ship Joaquin, who was four, and his older brother, River, saw something that shocked them: men on the ship catching flying fish and killing them by spiking them on nails driven into the hull. The Phoenix boys were horrified, Joaquin especially. That’s what fish was? The thing they’d been eating? Two months later, having settled in Florida, the entire family converted to veganism.
One of the first interviews Phoenix gave was to the Orlando Sentinel in 1989, when he was 14. Even back then the interviewer noted, “Donald Duck may be ‘awesome’ in his book, but here, too, is a kid pushing for a national boycott against tuna fish.” The interviewer also pointed out, “He could not stay still.”
It was around this time he took up smoking and hasn’t appreciably stopped since.
Before each role, he still gets crippling anxiety for weeks before shooting starts. The day before, he feels physically sick. For the first three weeks of shooting, he sweats so much that they have to put pads in his armpits.
He is, most directors will point out, incredibly shy – something most people don’t believe about him (“They think it’s an act or something,” James Gray, who has directed Phoenix in four films, has said). Gray remembers once waiting backstage with him before a television interview. Phoenix got so nervous he vomited.
Phoenix has got better at flying, but he used to be terrified. He’s always hated the powerlessness of it. Often, he would only fly when wearing a lucky pair of boxers that had toucans on them. Sometimes when he couldn’t find them, he simply missed the flight. More than once the pilot was required to calm him down.
And yet, none of it is a particular inconvenience, at least not in terms of acting. Rather, Phoenix sees it as bonus or, at the very least, a fuel. As he puts it, “It’s pure anxiety. And I love it.” It’s why, for instance, he mostly refuses to rehearse, because to rehearse is to know and to feel secure, and Phoenix revels in the anxiety of not knowing. It’s why he also hates read-throughs, something that became a problem on the set of Joker, as his costar Robert De Niro demands them. De Niro even called director Todd Phillips to demand that Phoenix show up: “Tell him he’s an actor and he’s got to be there,” De Niro told Phillips. “I like to hear the whole movie and we’re going to all get in a room and just read it.” Phoenix, meanwhile, was adamant, telling Phillips, “There’s no fucking way I’m doing a read-through.”
This shouldn’t be taken as disrespect. De Niro is Phoenix’s favourite American actor, ever since his brother once brought home a VHS of Raging Bull and the young Phoenix marvelled at the scene in which De Niro’s Jake LaMotta meets a girl through a chain-link fence and shakes her pinkie. He was blown away at what a beautiful little detail that was, what a glorious little moment, and thinks about it still. In some ways, he’s said, it’s the thing he’s always looking for.
Phoenix did eventually drag himself to De Niro’s company’s offices in New York for a read-through of sorts, though he hardly gave it his all. He mumbled his way through the script, before taking himself off to a corner to smoke. De Niro invited him to his office to talk, but, saying he felt sick, he didn’t want to. At Phillips’ urging, he reluctantly agreed. The two men eventually cleared the air, with De Niro taking Phoenix’s face into his hands and kissing him on the cheek. “It’s going to be OK, bubbeleh,” he said.
Phoenix doesn’t much like to watch movies of himself; he finds them excruciating. Partly, it’s because he’s striving for something that he feels he never quite finds. But also, he doesn’t much like to watch movies generally, preferring documentaries for the most part.
His favourite film, he will often say, is the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. This is also why Ferrell was tasked with talking to Phoenix for Interview magazine (sample exchange: Ferrell, “I was thinking about your role in Gladiator and the reason why it works is because you’re such a little bitch.” Phoenix, “I don’t know if that’s why the movie works. It probably had something to do with Ridley Scott.” Ferrell, “In your personal life, are you sometimes a little bitch?” Phoenix, “Be more specific”).
It helps that Step Brothers is a comedy, as it means Phoenix is less aware of the joins. For almost all other films, he equates it to a magician watching someone else perform tricks. He knows them all. Sometimes he’ll see a great one, one with actor and director working seamlessly, where he can’t figure out the moving parts, but it’s only then that he finds himself finally caught up in the moment. “With so many movies, it’s not really enjoyable.”
And so, when he will meet a director for a prospective part, even if that director will pass a DVD on to him, even if it is a much-cherished piece of their back catalogue, Phoenix will often not watch it. He’ll just decide if he likes the director and that will be that.
Joaquin Phoenix has a theory about acting and that theory is this: everything they teach you as a kid is wrong. Or, as he will put it, “completely fucking wrong”. They teach you to remember your lines. Wrong! They teach you to follow your light. Wrong! They teach you to hit your mark. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Those are the things, Phoenix will argue, that you shouldn’t do.
Despite more than 30 years as a professional actor, he’s purposefully not learnt the technical names or industry terms. One interviewer from the New York Times had to explain to him what a “tent-pole” movie was (“Tent-pole movie, is that what it’s called?”).
He came to this conclusion around the time of Walk The Line, which was entertaining but by the numbers. He realised he didn’t want to do that kind of acting any more. “You just act and it’s so ugly.”
So when is acting not acting? For Phoenix, it’s a sort of freestyle improv, a feeling that he’s chasing, the kind of thing easier to do than explain. But he knows the only way he’ll get to it: by feeling there’s no real control, by feeling genuine danger, to capture things that he hasn’t figured out, not the things he has. He wants it to be scary.
He decided all this, he says, before his 2010 mockumentary I’m Still Here, but even Phoenix will admit that if the remit was doing something with no control, danger and, in this instance, so scary it could have been a career suicide note, well, it certainly fitted the bill.
If you haven’t watched it, don’t. It’s pretty terrible, especially years later when you’re very much in on the joke, but that’s not the point. Phoenix, playing an uber-asshole version of himself who’s quitting acting to launch a hip-hop career, abuses everyone around him, tanks in clubs, snorts coke and hires hookers – and then it ends. It’s supposed to be a meta-commentary on... something or another. But one line, as the film starts, nevertheless rings true: “My artistic output thus far, when I’m really fucking honest with myself,” says Phoenix, pacing a hillside in a beat-up blue hoodie, “has been fucking fraudulent. And now for the first time I’m doing something, whether you like it or not, that I feel really represents me.”
Hoax or not, by the time Phoenix made his notorious semi-mute appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman, you could argue he’d lost it either way. Why would an up-and-coming actor with two Oscar nominations want to do that to himself?
But then as he later put it, “I thought Casey [Affleck] and I had actually achieved ultimate success with I’m Still Here, if your definition of success is completely destroying your career, which was somewhat the intent.”
And while for a time he and Casey Affleck, the director and his longtime best friend, argued about how far he should go, and while Casey’s brother, Ben Affleck, and friend Matt Damon tried to convince them to let people in on the joke (“The release was too clever by half,” Damon told the New York Times. “[The public] will not forgive you if they’re not in on the joke”) and while Phoenix worried he’d lost so much money on it (it tanked, naturally) that he might lose his house, it remained, he said, “unbelievably liberating. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in terms of helping me grow as an actor and having a deeper appreciation for acting.”
And it would lead, quite directly, to his post-2010 golden period, which Joker just crowned – parts as diverse as a sex-crazed drifter who falls under the spell of a cult leader (The Master), or a divorcee who falls for his computer (Her), or a drunken cowboy (The Sisters Brothers), a depressed professor (Irrational Man), stoned detective (Inherent Vice), or Jesus (Mary Magdalene). And the link to the two best is not even abstract, not even just about courage or growth, but directors who watched him play a man falling apart and apologise for it, and liking what they saw.
Paul Thomas Anderson watched I’m Still Here and, Phoenix said, “I think that’s why I got the job... Sort of just, ‘This fucking monkey will do anything. I’ll just let that monkey sling shit at himself. That will be great.’ And that was essentially what I was.” By the end of filming, Anderson had taken to calling him Bubbles, after Michael Jackson’s pet monkey.
Spike Jonze, meanwhile, said on Letterman that it was Phoenix’s contrite follow-up appearance on the talk-show host’s couch that caused him to cast him as sad sack Theodore Twombly in his acclaimed drama Her (“I didn’t know if he’d be right for the role,” said Jonze. “But you cast him for me”).
And, finally, in Joker, it was Phoenix’s new-found fearlessness that turned Joker from a so-so bro thought experiment from the guy who duded The Hangover trilogy into an Oscar-worthy creation for the ages.
Think of any of the iconic scenes in Joker and you can almost be certain they weren’t in Phillips’ script. Think of the dance that Phoenix’s Joker does in the toilet, fresh from a killing spree. The script merely asked that he look for somewhere to stash his gun, but Phoenix began to tango and Phillips was smart enough to have a handheld camera to capture it.
Think also of how he enters the TV studio to greet De Niro’s chat-show host – the waltzing dance followed by a handshake followed by a serious snogging of a fellow guest. Outtakes show Phoenix entering about 15 different ways.
And think, finally, of that opening scene, as the camera glides from behind Phoenix to find him putting on his clown face in a stage mirror. The camera moves to his right and finds him in profile just in time to see his face light up into a smile – what seems for all the world like a real smile, genuine joy. But, of course, this is a Phoenix smile, the one he’d been unwittingly perfecting for all those years. A moment later, it drops. And so Phoenix’s clown, wondering if he can alter his mood manually, pulls his smile up and down with his fingers at the corners of his mouth. How, the scene seems to ask, can I not feel this any more? But the experiment fails and a single blue tear rolls down his cheek.
Asked to define what affinity Phoenix felt to Arthur Fleck’s Joker, he replied, “Cosmic angst.”
If you want to know about Joaquin Phoenix’s personal life, the last person worth asking is Joaquin Phoenix.
The American TV journalist Anderson Cooper tried during a recent 60 Minutes special, asking, “When you’re not working, what do you do?”
“What do I do?” Phoenix replied. “I... I think I do normal things. I like to cook... I really don’t want to talk about what I do.”
In another interview, he went a little further, but not much. He watches a lot of documentaries. He likes to garden. He grows his own vegetables. But he’s not particularly “LA-active”: none of the standard yoga or hiking in the hills. He is not on social media. He has two dogs. He is engaged to the actress Rooney Mara, whom he met on the movie Her and nervously looked up on the internet afterwards to get in touch, something he says he’s never done before. He was convinced she hated him. He wakes very early, sometimes as early as 4am. And, as a result, bedtime is sometimes when the sun goes down. Why? The journalist didn’t get the scoop either. “I like to get up and do all the stuff I’m not going to tell you about. I get so excited about it,” he simply told them.
On the inside of his arm he has a “nothing” tattoo, which is to say it’s a circle and that it purposefully doesn’t symbolise anything, apart from the fact it’s a tattoo.
For the New York Times, the novelist Bret Easton Ellis came away with the revelation that Phoenix’s day involves “eating lunch, reading scripts and dinner”.
There are two Rosebud moments in the life of Joaquin Phoenix, depending on your point of view and depending on your choice of Rosebud.
The first happened around 15 years ago, just after he shot Walk The Line. He’d been drinking heavily and going to clubs. He thought of himself, he says now, as a hedonist. He was an actor in LA. He wanted to have a good time. “But I wasn’t engaging with the world or myself in the way I wanted to. I was being an idiot, running around, drinking, trying to screw people, going to stupid clubs.”
It was also around this time he flipped his car on a winding LA side road. Bloodied, bruised and disorientated, he was about to light a cigarette when he got a knock on the window and a German voice said, “Just relax.” Phoenix said he was relaxed and rolled down the window, but the German voice replied, “No, you’re not,” pointing out that he was about to light a cigarette in a car that was leaking petrol. The Good Samaritan, Phoenix realised after climbing out, was the director Werner Herzog.
Phoenix didn’t need the push to go to rehab: he just checked himself in. And while he hasn’t exactly quit drinking altogether – he still drinks when he flies, because he still hates flying – he has stopped smoking weed.
“There’s too many things I enjoy doing and I don’t want to wake up feeling hungover. It’s not a thing I fight against – it’s just the way I live my life,” he told Ellis.
And then, of course, there’s his brother, River, who notoriously overdosed from a mixture of heroin and cocaine (rumoured to have been handed to him in a liquid concoction in a Dixie Cup that contained a lethal dose) outside The Viper room in 1993 at the age of 23. Joaquin, just 19, made the heart-breaking 911 call from the phone box across the street (“You must get here,” he implored them. “Please! Please!”).
Phoenix understandably hasn’t spoken much about River’s death over the years, telling an American journalist when the subject was raised, “You’re such a great, decent human being. That sounds like I’m being sarcastic. I am.”
Yet in the same piece, out late last year, he allowed of his brother’s death, “It’s one, it’s one of the Rosebuds, but it’s not a Rosebud in the way that people think. At all.”
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