Welcome to the Archive Pull, a new series delving into the 30-year history of our print magazine. To celebrate his 50th birthday, we look back at Joaquin Phoenix’s cover profile, originally published in the January 2008 issue of Dazed & Confused.
He may have been on our screens since he was a mere eight years old, but when he’s in front of the cameras Joaquin Phoenix still gets nervous. “I experience the same amount of trepidation on every movie,” explains the 33-year-old actor when we meet outside his hotel on a rainy New York night. “Do you remember when you were a kid, the very first time you learned to swim? You go back to the pool for the second time and you’re like ‘I know I did this yesterday, but I'm going to drown, I’m certain of it’.”
Phoenix has spent the last 25 years in and around the film business. He’s gone from a 1982 debut in a TV series based on Seven Brides For Seven Brothers to gaining Oscar nominations for Gladiator, and his portrayal of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line. The late Richard Harris, who worked with him on Gladiator (and who had seen an actor or two in his time) called him a “brilliant actor, completely unpredictable, but with all the right instincts.”
Phoenix, one of five siblings, made that journey via roles in Hill Street Blues and Parenthood, four years spent travelling the world, brilliant performances for the likes of Gus Van Sant and Oliver Stone and, of course, the death of his brother River in 1993. It was Joaquin’s voice that was heard on countless news bulletins, making the call to 911, as River lay collapsed outside the Viper Room.
He’s currently in the 80s cops-and-drug-dealers film We Own The Night, alongside Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes and Robert Duvall. He plays nightclub owner Bobby Green, battling with his brother and father (Wahlberg and Duvall) – both policemen – and the Russian mafia who own his club. It’s a typically intense and layered performance from the young master of understated intensity.
In person Joaquin is affable and quick to laugh – the polar opposite of the on screen persona he’s made his own. He’s wearing a green sweater, big sunglasses tucked into the neck, and he’s by himself – no agents, publicists or managers.
As the man who’s famous for spending four months learning to play the guitar and sing like Johnny Cash, I start off by asking him how he prepared for this new role. “I didn’t,” he answers. “I showed up and asked what was going on.” Sometimes you’re not sure whether he’s being serious or not, because he smiles more or less constantly. “It changes every time,” he says, sipping on a Coke in the hotel bar, playing with a pack of Camel Lights. “There’s not one process for preparing for a role.”
So what drew him to We Are the Night? “To tell you the truth I honestly can’t remember the moment of decision,” he says, and you sense he’s turned from interview mode into normal conversation. “I can’t remember saying ‘I want to do this’ and I don’t think that there’s ever a specific reason, at least not for me, for doing something. The only time it’s specific is in stories I come up with when I’m doing an interview because I’m trying to figure out what to say.”
“I have moments of intensity, but you can say that about anybody” – Joaquin Phoenix
It turns out that Phoenix doesn’t like the idea of dividing his life into 30 definitive answers in an interview. He’s not surly or unpleasant – he seems genuinely interested in why it is that we expect our celebrities to be able to define themselves thus. For example, when I ask him whether he thinks he’s intense, or shy, he replies, “I have moments of intensity, but you can say that about anybody. When people ask those questions it’s the first time it occurs to you to think about it. Do you ever sit alone and think, ‘Am I shy? What type of shy person am I? Maybe I’m intense.’ I always feel kind of like I’m the garbage man or something, who’s being asked, ‘Are you an intense guy?’, when I’m just trying to take your trash out.”
It’s fair to say that Phoenix is still slightly perplexed by fame, and the media interest that goes with it. “I’ve been in the business since I was young but I really wasn’t aware of it,” he explains. “I didn’t watch entertainment television and I didn’t read entertainment magazines, so I didn’t really know what I was getting into. But I think that I have a fairly good level of fame. I’d rather not have any, truthfully, but it’s manageable. I pity some people who get really hounded.”
He still doesn’t go to the cinema often, preferring to watch the Discovery Channel and documentaries. He’s more enthusiastic about a programme he’s seen recently about divers who can hypnotise sharks (“they touch them on the head, or rub them or something, and the fucking thing just goes completely dead still!”) than he is in talking movies. “I like the idea of the movie experience being a personal one,” he says. “Any time l’ve been in an art gallery – and I don’t know fuck all about art – I hate being there with a bunch of other people. I want to be alone and I want to take my time. I don’t like the collective energy – I don’t like being guided emotionally by others. Particularly if you go to independent cinemas in big cities because there you find all the pretentious people who talk through the film.”
Phoenix doesn’t even watch his own films, or read his press. He also tries not to use personal experiences to inform his roles – “It’s the opposite of what you want to do as an actor. I don’t want to be aware of myself, I don’t want to think ‘How does the camera see me,’ or, ‘How do other people see me’ – all you’re trying to do is forget about yourself and take on a different experience.”
It’s that pragmatism that’s so unexpected, after all he checked into rehab after playing the alcohol and drug addicted Johnny Cash, and the rumours were that he took his method too far. He’s since denied that, and will only say, with a shrug, “I’ve talked about that enough, I’m not going to talk about it any more.”
So one expects him, when discussing recovering after a role, to wax lyrical about inhabiting the character. Instead he says, “If you went somewhere that you’d never been for ten weeks and wore different clothes, went to different restaurants in a different time zone, it would take you a while to adjust. That’s what you do making a film. You go home afterwards and for the first few weeks you’re like ‘what the fuck do I do? I remember that I used to wake up and I used to go into my kitchen, but now when I do that it doesn’t feel the same’. It’s just a matter of being in a different fucking place for three months and then going back to your life.”
He’s moved a lot in his time, most recently from New York to Los Angeles. He now lives in Hollywood; in fact, when his car recently overturned Werner Herzog was first on the scene. “He just kept telling me to ‘relass’,” says Phoenix, revelling in the thick German accent. “I thought I was ‘relassed’, but he obviously thought I needed to ‘relass’ more.”
His family – missionaries for the Children of God religious movement, until it was engulfed in scandal – also moved a lot when he was a child in the 70s and 80s. He was born in Puerto Rico, whereas River was born in Oregon. His other siblings Rain, Summer and Liberty were born in Texas, Florida and Venezuela respectively. Joaquin’s early roles were credited to Leaf Phoenix – because he wanted a nature-based name like them. He’s still a vegan, and has campaigned for PETA.
What was it about their life that made four of the five children take up careers in film or music? “My parents allowed us to be inventive. We didn’t watch TV – I still don’t have a desire to watch much TV – and there weren’t really video games when I was growing up. I think that you’re more inventive, more imaginative in a way without them, and I think that was part of the attraction to acting. We used to put on kid plays, that kind of thing, where you just invent characters. So in some ways my career is an extension of that.”
The family moved back to America, and the children found an agent – Iris Burton, who is still representing him today. His mother Arlyn worked as a secretary at NBC and his father John was, depending on which account of his life you read, a landscaper or furniture restorer. The TV roles, and film roles credited to Leaf followed. In 1993, outside the Viper Room nightclub in Los Angeles his brother River died. The tape of the 911 telephone call Joaquin made was played around the world, lending him a different kind of fame entirely. He fixes me with those jade green eyes, and I notice the birthmark above his lip for the first time. “Don’t think you’re going to find some sneaky way to get me to talk about it,” he says. I protest my innocence a little too much and that stare goes on. “Yo’'re like a flopping, dying fish,” he says. Then looking down at my red socks he adds, ‘But you’ve got nice socks so it doesn’t matter.”
“The Oscars are a little bit like politics. It’s the money behind you, the machine behind you, that’s really effective” – Joaquin Phoenix
Phoenix also refuses to discuss what he’s done with a recent year off. “That’s my time,” he says. He remains friendly, however, and his smile rarely drops – it seems like he just divides the personal and the professional very clearly. Maybe that barrier is why Phoenix made it out of the usual child-actor fate unscathed, leaving countless bright young things in his wake. I ask him how he has made that transition so successfully? “What’s success?” he shoots back (Phoenix has a tendency to turn the interview around from time to time). Well, how does he define success, I ask. “Doing what you want,” he replies. “I am very fortunate that I am able to make choices based on what I want to do, yet that could end tomorrow. It’s not the most consistent job in some wavs.”
He attributes at least some of that freedom as an adult to taking a break to travel through Central America for three or four years as a teenager. “I left for a while at a good stage. I stopped when I was 15 and started again when I was 19. That area of ages is an awkward time to be in films, in terms of the choices one has for roles.” Phoenix returned to play a teen willing to turn hitman for the love of Nicole Kidman in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For. It had many of his trademarks – intensity, dark humour, those green eyes – and critical acclaim followed. “I got a job when I was 19,” he says, shrugging. “A bunch of us went up for it, and I happened to get lucky. I don’t think that it was because I was better than anybody else – maybe more suited at the time for a part. It would be one thing if you were talking to me and I was a successful theatre actor, but to be honest I don’t think that film actors can take a lot of credit because it’s a director’s medium. You’re so completely a hostage to the director.”
Without watching his movies he can’t even judge his Oscar-nominated performances. “If you’ve ever been in the editing room you know it’s incredible what they can do,” he says. “The Oscars are a little bit like politics. It’s the money behind you, the machine behind you, that’s really effective. There’s a lot of brilliant performances I’m sure you’ve seen that didn’t even register on their radar.”
But surely, when he was immersing himself in Johnny Cash, learning to play the guitar, to replicate the voice, living and breathing the Man in Black, he must have had a sense that he was doing something good? “That’s what was required of me, that’s what I was supposed to do for that,” he says, and you get the impression it’s not false modesty. “I just did my job.”