New Year New Men
The Sunday Times: Style Supplement, January 2, 2005
By Chrissy Iley
He's vulnerable and brooding and this year he steps up to a leading-man role. Chrissy Iley talks to Joaquin Phoenix about the journey from offbeat outsider to fully fledged action hero.
Joaquin Phoenix's lips are flaring. His head is in his hands. It looks like he's being suffocated by the foreign press who have come to talk to him about his new movie, Ladder 49. He takes me aside. "Can we have breakfast tomorrow at the Chateau Marmont?" he pleads. "I'm not in a good state."
Until now, Phoenix has always played the edgy outsider, someone a little off-centre, a little distant, a little odd — the sexually thwarted Abbé in Quills; the vulnerable villain — the Roman emperor in Gladiator; Mel Gibson's awkward younger brother in Signs. But in Ladder 49, his trademark shiftiness has been honed into the demeanour of a fully fledged hero: a brave, funny, strong but vulnerable fireman.
The role fits him perfectly, even if he's less than comfortable with leading-man fame. You get asked stupid questions. When a Danish journalist asks, inanely, "Have you ever made a 911 call?" Phoenix gives that little curl of his lip, and says "No" — although everyone knows he made one of the most famous 911 calls in Hollywood history when he found his brother River dying of an overdose outside the Viper Room in 1993. The news was broadcast worldwide, but he doesn't like to talk about it. "Because it was such a public death," he tells me later, "I felt robbed of my memories."
At breakfast, he's wearing shoes with enormous tongues, loose-fitting trousers and an oversized shirt. You get the idea that there is a lot going on behind that exterior — on screen and off, he's good at saying nothing but making you believe he feels everything.
In preparation for the film, he spent time working in a fire station. "Every firefighter I met there was in conflict about how to balance their personal and professional lives, and there are moments when they can't. You just have to go off and be on your own. It was the first time I felt the potential to play a hero who could be flawed, who had these moments of isolation."
Phoenix obviously identifies with this. The director Joel Schumacher once commented that he seemed so vulnerable, he was almost naked in front of you. This idea makes me nervous. "Why are you fidgeting with your necklace?" he says. "That's my job."
Filming on Ladder 49 finished a year ago, but the actors who trained in the fire station still get in touch at least once a month. It's as if they don't want to lose the shared experience of danger, and the bonding. I wonder whether Phoenix might have been happier as a firefighter than an actor. "There is a fear about celebrity," he says, "but I can always go places where nobody is going to bother me. I just don't ever want to be a 'personality'. I want the freedom to try different things."
This reluctance to be pinned down seems to stem from his free-spirited, hippie childhood. His mother, Arlyn, left her boring job and decided to hitchhike from her home in the Bronx to the West Coast. There, she was picked up by John Bottom. The two fell in love, then joined the Children of God cult and went off to South America. When their guru turned out to be mad, materialistic and exploitative, the family escaped and changed their name to Phoenix. They made it back to Florida as stowaways on a boat, with nothing more than the clothes they stood up in.
Last time I met him, I can remember being obsessed by the scar just above his lip that made him seem so wounded and so strong. This time, I'm fixated by a strange shaved portion at the front of his hair; a peak of stubble. "You're looking at my shaved widow's peak. That was for Johnny Cash. I had to shave it," he says, apologetically. He is known for his intense preparation for roles, gaining or losing 20lb without blinking. Right now, he's looking less buff than in Ladder 49, having bulked out to play the amphetamine-fuelled Cash.
An agent once told him he had to work out more because preserving his body was part of his craft. He is no longer Phoenix's agent. "I didn't fire him because of that, but I felt it was inappropriate. I want to be able to change my physicality to whatever is appropriate for a role. In the 1970s, which is my favourite time period for movies, there wasn't this obsession with having to have a sculptured body. I've been on sets where I have to be filmed getting out of the bed and wardrobe has a shirt of a T-shirt for me, and I've thought, 'I don't know any guys who sleep with their shirt on.' And I bet if I had a six-pack, I wouldn't have to wear that shirt." He says this with a particularly piercing look that seems to demands reassurance. I say it must be the same for women who feel they need to have Botox injections. "What's Botox?" he asks. When I explain, he listens incredulously and says: "Christ, it breaks my heart."
Phoenix doesn't think his childhood was weird. It only seemed strange if you weren't in it, he says. What he does remember, all too viscerally, are the fish on the boat to Florida being based to death by the fishermen — the reason, he says, that he has been a lifelong vegan. I tell him I read once that he cried when his girlfriend ordered lobster in a restaurant. "Oh, come on. I don't remember that ever happening. My girlfriend is actually a vegan." Do you think it would be difficult to go out with someone who didn't have the same preferences? "No, I've been out with girls who eat meat. And I've never met a girl who shared my taste in music. Every girl that I've gone out with has really bad taste."
Not his taste, at least. He likes only the Beatles and David Bowie. He listens to music a lot, and has been playing the guitar for his role as Johnny Cash. I ask him what else he does to relax. "You mean a hobby?" he mocks. "That's private. If something becomes public, to me, it becomes tainted. I just can't share it with you." He's squirming in his layers now, searching for a ciggie and begging: "Please let's not spend an hour trying to guess my secret hobby."
If you're wondering what he does, I can tell you he knows far too much about Pro Tools, a music programme on his computer, and far too much about how to disembowel a Sgt Pepper track, and far too much about beats per minute for his own good. So knowing, yet so naïve. It's all just so endearing, it makes me want to fidget some more.
pictures from this article:
