Men of the Year: Joaquin Phoenix, Line Walker
GQ, December 2005
By Chris Norris
Playing music legends has gotten a lot harder since the days of "Kurt Russell is... Elvis." After Jamie Foxx's eerie simulacrum of Ray Charles, you can't just grow out the sideburns and cop the moves anymore; you have to really sing. But when Joaquin Phoenix prepared to scale the colossus of Johnny Cash – whose very greeting, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," might make fainter actors quail – he began with something more basic than mannerisms or vocal timbre. He started with the songs. Before the months of guitar lessons and the work with a vocal coach to lower his range to a Cashly baritone, Phoenix delved into the autobiography of the Cash catalog. "The first thing we did was sit down with [producer] T-Bone [Burnett] and talk about the songs," he explains. "For days – the music, the lyrics, what they meant – that was the gateway."
Phoenix's star turn as the OG of American outlaw music in Walk the Line works so well because it draws on the dark psychological terrain of Cash's imagination. "John's music was obviously such a big part of his life," says the 32-year-old actor, formerly known as the dark-horse sibling of the fallen River. "He would sing in his sleep. So that's how we approached these characters – through the music."
Unlike Foxx's canny Charles, Phoenix's young Cash is an entirely new vision: laconic, out of sorts, with a hard, obsidian stare, more like Eminem in 8 Mile than anyone from the Grand Ole Opry. This film peaks with Cash's near riotous 1968 concert in Folsom Prison – which Phoenix recalls as a buck-wild event to shoot. "To get that energy, I sort of turned the extras against the crew," he recalls, "made it like they were the guards, and I started breaking stuff." By the time the technical problems hit, it was clear his method was working: "An amp burst into flames and everyone went fuckin' crazy."
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