I want to get to set early because I’m excited about the work

before being shepherded into a hotel ballroom to sit in front of rows of international press is a “wildly different experience” and a bewildering one.

With a slightly hoarse, faltering timbre, his voice is more befitting of a cult leader than a leading man, and his appearance is also pretty un-Hollywood: today he’s wearing a scruffy black jumper, black jeans, Converse trainers and goofy white socks with pirates and hearts on them, and an unplugged set of iPhone earphones thrown around his neck.

I tell him I want to ask him about I’m Still Here, the 2010 mockumentary that purports to follow Phoenix from the announcement of his retirement from acting but I don’t get very far. “I’m done! I’m done with I’m Still Here it’s like,” Phoenix says, before catching himself being a little petulant.

I’m interested in how Phoenix gave so much life to the project, which saw him pretend to feign a public breakdown and simultaneous foray into rap music over many months, only for critics to be disappointed rather than impressed when they discovered he’d been “faking” it. “Yes, it was a lot of time invested but you learn to value the experience of making the movie versus how people react to the movie,” he insists. “And so if people react to the movie in a positive way and they like it you go, ‘Oh cool, maybe that’ll give me an opportunity to make another one’, but it’s not really going to define the experience.”

Something Phoenix is much more happy to talk about is his dogs. He has two rescues, and it occurs to me that a rescue dog might be a nice descriptor for his acting, the men he plays often look tough and quietly dangerous but beneath the surface possess a sadness and humility. One of his dogs, who he charmingly refers to as his “girl”, greets him in the morning by leaping up onto the bed, standing over him and licking his face, just delighted that he’s awake.

“My favourite thing is just when they’re out exploring on their own,” he says. “I’ll creep around the house and just watch them, wondering like, ‘What is their little internal life? What are the things they’re after?’” It’s probably no coincidence that these animals he so loves are incapable of seeing him as a celebrity.

Happy though he is with his home life, Phoenix was anxious to get back to work after taking two years off. “I didn’t think I’d be able to do it,” he says of the punishing shooting schedule, which has seen him commit to four projects. Mary Magdalene, in which the actor plays Jesus Christ, Lynne Ramsay’s excellent

revenge thriller You Were Never Really Here, a biopic of quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan called Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot and lastly Western dark comedy The Sisters Brothers. The eclectic nature of these projects got him through, as did his stringent vetting process.

“I’m really specific and careful about the movies I choose to do. I wanna wake up and want to get to set early because I’m excited to dig into the work.” Mary Magdalene certainly seems to have stirred feelings for Phoenix; he’s since begun a relationship with the film’s lead, Rooney Mara.

Coming off the back of You Were Never Really Here in which he plays a monolith of a man, Phoenix was put on a “brutal” 300-calories-a-day for Mary Magdalene so as not to portray the