Resurrected
Joaquin Phoenix rebuilds his career
Talking to Joaquin Phoenix is like verbal motocross. To get around the smallest conversational hummock you have to gun the engine like billy-oh, then suddenly you’re skittering down the side of a gully at breakneck speed. Or at least that’s how things are in his London hotel room this morning, where the 43-year-old actor has just awoken from a two-hour nap after staring at the ceiling all night.
He flew in late for the British premiere of his latest film, and his body clock is still on Hollywood time, though the packet of cigarettes he is chain-smoking his way through by an open window seems to be wrenching him into the present.
Mid-cigarette, he’s wry and convivial, but the moment it’s finished we’re back on a hump, and he’s scratching the armrest of his chair until the next one is lit.
I find myself mentally cataloguing all of this behaviour because I’ve just spent the duration of Phoenix’s new film doing the same. You Were Never Really Here – a hitman thriller in which the man matters more than the hit – is built out of twitches and tells.
Directed by the Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame, and adapted from a novella by Jonathan Ames, it stars Phoenix as Joe, a bearlike Gulf War and FBI veteran who now specialises in springing trafficked children from paedophile rings and dispatching their captors with maximum ruthlessness.
The film is less obsessed with what Joe actually does than with the question of how he can do it at all – poring over his preparatory rituals and lingering in the bloodspattered aftermath. The violence in between is hard and artless, and often tucked out of shot.
In short, the film holds back everything you expect while filling in blanks you hadn’t even considered – which, Phoenix explains, had been his and Ramsay’s aim from the start. Or at least almost the start: initially, he’d turned the film down because its schedule clashed with The Sisters Brothers, a western caper he was making with the French director Jacques Audiard. But when that shoot was postponed he got back in touch with Ramsay. The director rallied her crew, and within six weeks they were on set.
In the interim, the two spent a month filleting her already pareddown script: ‘‘fighting the cliches of the genre, trying to find ways to say what was necessary, and I guess uncover Joe’s personality,’’ he says.
He also spoke with a former US Marine turned private security contractor who specialises in rescuing children from sexual slavery. ‘‘I wanted there to feel like there was a lot going on – that he wasn’t this cliched silent assassin,’’ he says. ‘‘Because I’ve seen that done so many times.’’
The film they came up with is made from small but pricklingly unforgettable moments: Joe fiddling with jelly beans on his boss’ sofa, Joe semi-patiently caring for his elderly mother, Joe psyching himself up in a Russian bath house before a hit. The result is bleakly spellbinding, and won Phoenix the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival last year.
The film caps a formidable run of recent work that has also taken in two films with Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master and Inherent Vice) and another with long-term collaborator James Gray (The Immigrant). After this, things get a bit stranger: he’s playing the DC Comics supervillain in The Joker, subject to the usual backstage wrangling, and before that Jesus Christ, in the Biblical drama Mary Magdalene (which opened in New Zealand this week).
Phoenix’s performance as the Son of God has been described by The Hollywood Reporter as ‘‘a doubt-racked mystic-stoner cult leader somewhere between Charles Manson and The Dude from The Big Lebowski’’, which sounds about right.
It was during the filming of Mary Magdalene in 2016 that Phoenix fell into a relationship
"We thought that when I announced my retirement, the whole joke would be that nobody cared."
Actor Joaquin Phoenix
with Rooney Mara, who plays the film’s title character.
We get onto this via, of all subjects, Harvey Weinstein, with whom Phoenix had a run-in-byproxy a few years ago. The disgraced studio mogul – who has been accused by more than 80 women of rape, sexual abuse and harassment – bought the rights to his 2013 film The Immigrant ,a drama about a Polish woman, played by Marion Cotillard, making a new life for herself in Twenties New York. (Phoenix plays a showman and pimp who takes her under his wing, for only partly nefarious reasons.)
But after a feud in the edit suite with the film’s director James Gray – Weinstein wanted to shoot a new happy ending, with Cotillard twirling euphorically over the mountains, and Gray refused – the film was buried in the US, and in the UK it is as yet unreleased. Phoenix says that he ‘‘had heard he had been difficult’’, though acknowledges the system as it stood worked to keep people like him in the dark.
‘‘I think often as an actor you’re shielded from that stuff,’’ he says. As for the sexual assaults: ‘‘I’d heard rumours about him sleeping with actresses, but they were just rumours. I never heard anything about assault or harassment.’’
Phoenix started popping up on television at the age of eight, when he called himself Leaf – a better fit, the young boy felt, with his siblings River, Rain, Summer and Liberty, who were signed en masse by Iris Burton, a specialist agent for child actors their mother Arlyn had insistently wooed.
He was by the side of his elder brother River when he died of a drug overdose outside the Viper Room nightclub in Hollywood in 1993: he was 23 and Joaquin just 19, and the younger brother’s anguished call to the emergency services became a ghoulish fixture on the nightly news.
Phoenix was born in 1974 in Puerto Rico, where his parents were living in a commune run by a cult called The Children of God, though the couple became disillusioned, extracted themselves and returned to the US when Joaquin was four. Their instincts turned out to be good: the cult went on to become notorious for advocating paedophilia and incest, with horrific abuses uncovered by police in a series of raids in the early 1990s.
I want to ask him if You Were Never Really Here’s themes of institutionalised child abuse made him reflect on this early life escape, but have been told all family talk is explicitly off the table – presumably because we meet a few days after news breaks of his sister Summer’s divorce from Casey Affleck.
It was Phoenix’s friendship with his now ex-brother-in-law that led to I’m Still Here, the 2010 mockumentary directed by Affleck in which Phoenix pretended to retire from acting to pursue a career as a rapper. The film was supposed to be ‘‘like a Saturday Night Live skit’’, Phoenix says. ‘‘We thought that when I announced my retirement, the whole joke would be that nobody cared.’’ Instead, the newly ascendant online showbusiness media turned him into rolling news. ‘‘If it had been five years earlier, it wouldn’t have made so much noise,’’ he says. ‘‘We were shocked. We were like, ‘Oh, there goes our idea for the joke’. So we just reacted to that moment and unfortunately it kept going.’’
Phoenix imagined the project would fill in a spare four weeks. Instead, filming wore on for more than a year. ‘‘And I remember struggling, not knowing what to do because it felt like we’d started this thing, we were halfway through, and we had to keep going,’’ he says.
When it was finally revealed as a hoax, both Phoenix and Affleck’s careers were temporarily toast.
From I’m Still Here toY ou Were Never Really Here, it sounds as though his new film is rebuking the old one, I suggest.
Phoenix shrugs and gives a non-committal smile. ‘‘As the Russians say, c’est la vie,’’ he says. – The Daily Telegraph