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When he talks about the career that has already garnered him two Oscar
nominations, Joaquin Phoenix sounds oddly disappointed.
“It doesn’t really change your life,” the 33-year-old actor says flatly,
placing a box of Camel Lights on the table between us. “I always imagined
that people went to the Golden Globes and the Oscars and they touched that
thing, the Oscar, and then partied for four days. The truth is that you go
home, take off your suit and everything is exactly the same as it was
before.”
Well, not quite. The difference is, surely, that you suddenly become public
property. Here we are, after all, meeting in a hotel suite to discuss
Phoenix’s latest film, the New York crime thriller We Own the Night.
His exasperation with the trappings of stardom may be understandable, but
isn’t it all part of the game?
“It’s a weird thing,” he says with a smile. “On the one hand people don’t want
you to be different, but they also want you to be a ‘movie star’ and not be
like them. I remember going to a training academy for one film. After ten
minutes you could feel a faint sense of disappointment ripple through the
crowd, that I wasn’t untouchable, that I wasn’t a ‘star’. It was almost like
they wished I had turned up in a limo wearing sunglasses.”
The first of Phoenix’s Oscar nods was more than six years ago, for his role as
the evil Emperor Commodus in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. But it
was the second, for his uncanny recreation of the singer Johnny Cash in
2005’s Walk the Line, which really made critics and audiences
take notice. Overnight, he was hot property. But playing Cash took its toll.
After filming was over, there were reports that he had checked himself into
rehab for an alcohol problem. He was quoted at the time as saying that he
felt “abandoned” when the long, emotionally draining shoot was over.
“I wasn’t an everyday drinker, but I didn’t have anything else to do, anything
to hold me down,” he reportedly said at the time. “I was leaning on alcohol
to make me feel OK.”
Inhabiting Cash, and in particular dealing with the singer’s lifelong battles
with booze, had made him confront his own demons. “A lot of the film is
about Cash getting sober and that made me think about sobriety. I always
thought that you were a pussy if you couldn’t handle your drink. Then I
realised that to be sober is one of the most courageous and difficult things
to do because it’s life on life’s terms and you don’t get an easy fix.”
Today, though, Phoenix isn’t about to discuss that period or, indeed, whether
he’s still sober. Any hint of the discussion moving towards his private life
is headed off, politely, at the pass.
Whatever his personal difficulties after playing Cash, the film’s success
meant that Hollywood blockbusters came calling. “I got offered all that sort
of stuff,” he says with distaste. “It’s thoroughly depressing. I read all
the scripts that are in my particular range and they are all crap.
“What typically happens is that actors who have made ‘unconventional films’
with some level of success are immediately grabbed by the studios to lend
credibility to their crap films. Of course, the actors want to do them to
make up for the ten years when they didn’t get paid.
“Not to say that it isn’t a temptation, but so far I haven’t succumbed to it.
Not that I make classy movies – in my own way, I have made tons of crap and
will continue to do so – but maybe it hasn’t been quite so blatant.”
Phoenix’s way of guarding against the “crap” is to throw himself all the way
in. On We Own the Night he made himself physically sick for a scene
in which his character watches helplessly as his father (Robert Duvall) is
shot. Most actors wouldn’t feel the need to go that far, but he put the idea
to his director, James Gray.
“On the day we were shooting that scene we still hadn’t decided how I was
going to react,” he explains. “And that’s exciting because most directors
go, ‘I want the actor to bellow to the heavens and cry because I need the
audience to know that this is an emotional moment.’ “But not James. For him
to say, ‘Yeah, I’ll let my actor run up and vomit’ is really ballsy and
interesting. That’s why I like working with him.”
All of which makes Phoenix sound like an oddball, when he’s charming, funny
and likeable. Even when refusing to answer questions about his private life
and colourful background, such as when his Christian missionary parents
travelled across South America with five young kids in tow, he does it with
a smile. “I have a lot of happy memories from my childhood, thanks. But you
have to leave those memories with me. Right?”
He first started acting as a ten-year-old on TV shows, under the name Leaf
Phoenix, and moved into family films such as Space Camp and Parenthood.
At 15, he turned his back on acting and went travelling to Mexico with his
father. He reemerged some four years later – now calling himself Joaquin,
his birth name – opposite Nicole Kidman’s ruthlessly ambitious TV reporter
in To Die For.
His reluctance to discuss the past may also stem from the drugs-related death
of his older brother, River Phoenix, outside a Los Angeles nightclub. It was
Joaquin, then 19, who called the emergency services. He also struggles to
answer when asked how he fills his time away from work. “I really don’t do
anything. I just have a normal life. It sounds so awful and boring. I hate
the beach. I don’t like travelling. I don’t like the things most people
would say they like.”
He is being harsh on himself. At work, he has made mostly interesting choices:
Thomas Vinterberg’s haunting It’s All about Love; a
cynical serviceman in Buffalo Soldiers; a cameraman in Hotel Rwanda.
He is happiest, he says, when unsure how to approach a role, or when the
subject matter touches on moral ambiguity. This is why he likes working with
Gray so much.
Alongside Mark Wahlberg, he made the gritty, much-praised drama The Yards for
Gray in 2000. And both actors were back on board for Gray again in We Own
the Night.
Set in the 1980s, the film has them playing brothers on opposite sides of the
law. Bobby (Phoenix) is running a nightclub owned by Russian gangsters and
Joseph (Wahlberg) has followed his father into the police force. As the two
worlds collide, Bobby is forced to choose which side he’s on.
For Gray, the film explores the familiar terrain of sibling rivalry and family
loyalties; for Phoenix it’s also about being drawn reluctantly into a spiral
of violence.
“It’s about destiny and fate, sure,” he says. “But I interpret it as a tragic
story. It’s not about a guy who has turned his life around; this is a dude
who has unlocked a level of hate that he had never experienced before.”
Phoenix is already working on a third film with Gray, Two Lovers, with
Gwyneth Paltrow. “Most movies are so antiseptic, so full of clichés and
surface emotions that anything that digs slightly deeper is considered dark.
With James you have the sense that you are going to try to discover things
in a different way.”
And with that the decidedly different Phoenix smiles and disappears, job done
and real life awaiting.
We Own the Night is on general release on Nov 14
BESOTTED TEEN, ROMAN RAT, SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, JOHNNY CASH... HOW THE
PHOENIX ROSE
To Die For (1995)
Phoenix got his big break in Gus Van Sant’s pitch-black comedy, playing an
anguished teen who becomes besotted with Nicole Kidman’s psychotic weather
girl and is manipulated by her into murdering her husband (Matt Dillon). The
film also starred Casey Affleck, who went on to marry Phoenix’s sister,
Summer.
Gladiator (2000)
A vain, scowling schemer who murders his father and lusts after his sister,
the vile Emperor Commodus ranks as one of the most memorable villains of
recent years. It garned Phoenix his first Oscar nomination, for Best
Supporting Actor, but he lost out to Benicio del Toro for Traffic.
Buffalo Soldiers (2001)
A bona fide leading role for the fast-rising Phoenix in this quirky indie hit.
And another morally dubious type: a US soldier who spices up the tedium of
his posting in 1980s Germany by dealing serious quantities of heroin,
joyriding in tanks and seducing the teenage daughter of his hated commanding
officer.
Walk the Line (2005)
He added to his gallery of tortured souls with a typically intense turn as
Johnny Cash, who reportedly suggested him for the role after seeing him in Gladiator.
Learning the guitar from scratch, he performed all his songs and was
rewarded with his second Oscar nomination.
