I Walked the Line With Johnny Cash
Scotsman.com, January 16, 2006
By Ed Colley
Dressed head-to-toe in black, with guitar slung over his shoulder, Joaquin Phoenix strides out on to the makeshift stage at Folsom Prison, in a recreation of Johnny Cash's landmark 1968 concert.
When he swings his shiny guitar round and strikes up the first note, the inmates go wild and it's hard to separate the actor from the country music legend.
The role of Cash in Walk the Line is a gift for Phoenix, making him the front-runner for tonight's Best Actor Golden Globe and a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination on 31 January. It would be the second Oscar nod for the 31-year-old, who won a supporting actor nomination in 2000 for his unhinged emperor Commodus in Gladiator.
Phoenix has always been a favourite with critics, and his performance as Cash is the best he's ever given. Walk the Line, already lavished with praise on the festival circuit, tracks the early life of the country icon as he rises to fame – and trouble – in the 1950s and 1960s.
Born in extreme poverty in Arkansas to cotton-farmer parents, Cash grew up listening to the spiritual and country music of the 1930s and 1940s, especially as performed by the popular Carter family. After a stint in the US Air Force in Germany, he returned to the US, married his girlfriend, Vivian, and started writing music.
His down-home sound and lyrics about love, life and death among the downtrodden soon earned him a rowdily appreciative audience, and, by the mid-1950s he was playing 300 dates a year – and dependent on amphetamines and barbiturates to keep going.
On the circuit, he met the vivacious June Carter (played here with conviction by Reese Witherspoon), one of the singing Carter girls, and fell in love. She refused at first to get involved with a married man and a drug addict, so it was 13 years before they finally tied the knot, which is where the film ends its story.
On meeting Phoenix, it's immediately obvious that he possesses the same brooding magnetism as Cash himself. He's not imposing at 5ft 8in, but his startling looks – piercing light-blue eyes and unconventionally handsome features – are distinctive enough to warrant a huge female fanbase. It's a demanding role that calls for ageing, musical performance (he sings all the songs himself), and drug-crazed scenes of rage and recovery, but Phoenix is one of those serious, intense actors who immerse themselves in their work.
"When I try and create a character, I try to live that life," he says. "I did four months of prep for this film, and then three-and-a-half months in Memphis shooting it. I get to a new place; I don't talk to anybody that I know. I ask people to call me JR [the initials by which Cash was known to his friends]. Everything I do is about the character, so any time my personal life comes into it, frankly, it fucks me up, you know? I can't hold both my personal life and the character in the same body at the same time."
Such dedication took its toll. Shortly after filming finished in April last year, Phoenix checked into rehab to be treated for alcoholism. He says that, while he wasn't drinking every day, he was keen to kick the habit altogether. It is unclear how much of a problem he had, but his decision to clean up would probably have been influenced by the shocking death in 1993 of his brother River, from a drug overdose.
Joaquin famously made the emergency phone call from the Los Angeles nightclub where his brother died. Then 18, Joaquin's desperate call from the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard was broadcast on news bulletins all over the world.
Did that dreadful episode help him to understand the drug and drink abusing Cash, who, at the age of 12, also lost his older brother, in a gruesome accident?
"I see that people would assume that I use or project my personal experiences," Phoenix says, "but that's never been of help to me in acting. If anything, it made me self-conscious of what other people thought."
He grew up in a free-spirited, creative family, travelling with his missionary parents and four siblings around Puerto Rico (where he was born), Venezuela and Mexico. Their on-the-road lifestyle has been exaggerated, he says now, "blown up out of all proportion. From when I was five till I was 13, we were in LA. It was more stable than you think".
It was in California that his enterprising mother got a job in a casting department and kickstarted her children's film careers. Like River, who was eight years his senior, Joaquin broke into acting at an early age, starring in a US TV series of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, on which River was a regular. Of his three sisters, Summer and Rain are also actors; Liberty tried it, but gave up to look after her two children.
Around that time, Joaquin changed his name to Leaf because nobody, he claims, could pronounce his real name (it's "Wakeen"). A string of guest parts in TV series such as Hill Street Blues and Murder, She Wrote followed before his breakthrough film performance in 1995, in To Die For, for which he returned to his real name.
After that film, Phoenix essentially stepped into his brother's shoes as the "next big thing". He starred in U-Turn for Oliver Stone, 8mm for Joel Schumacher, Gladiator, The Yards with Charlize Theron, Quills with Kate Winslet, Buffalo Soldiers and two M Night Shyamalan blockbusters, Signs and The Village. When director James Mangold was looking for an actor to play Cash, Phoenix was bound to be on the shortlist.
It helped that Cash, who was closely involved with the film before he died, was a fan of the actor's work and had previously met him.
"I went to have dinner at their house before I even heard about the movie," recalls Phoenix. "We were in their living room and John just started strumming. He said he was waiting for June before he could get his nerve up. And I thought, 'Wow, this is Johnny Cash waiting to get his nerve up. This guy has played prisons and he's nervous.' Then June came in and they started singing On the Banks of the River Jordan and they're looking into each other's eyes, and the connection and love they had was palpable."
By the time Phoenix was cast, both Cash and Carter were too ill to meet him again and both died soon afterwards within months of each other. Cash's passion for Carter, which is at the film's heart, lifts Walk the Line out of the ordinary.
Phoenix and Witherspoon achieve a rare romantic chemistry, making up for the formulaic biopic aspects imposed by the filmmakers. The two actors helped each other out considerably, especially since both were using their own singing voices. But while Witherspoon was required to master tambourine and auto-harp, Phoenix had to duplicate Cash's natural ease with the guitar. "I played every day and no matter what I was doing, I had a guitar," he says. "At some point it just becomes a part of you."
The whole experience was evidently intense on every level. The good thing, Phoenix says, was to experience it "with someone else that was in the same boat. Reese and I really relied on each other and developed a dynamic through to the music".
He has had little time for mundane things like a love life, however. He is quick to point out: "As long as I work like that, I am not ideal boyfriend material – my work has always come first." There has, all the same, been some rumour of a new girlfriend. Since his one long-term relationship, with actress Liv Tyler in 1998, he has claimed to date only "outside the industry".
He seems to spend much of his free time with his sister Liberty's children, Rio Everest and Indigo Orion. It's good to know that this most intense of actors finds some respite from the serious business of acting. Especially as, with the attention he's getting for Walk the Line, he'd better brace himself for a busy few years ahead.
Walk the Line is released 3 February
Life of the man in black
• 1932 Born JR Cash in Kingsland, Arkansas.
• 1944 Elder brother Jack dies in a sawmill accident.
• 1954 Marries Texan Vivian Liberto and they settle in Memphis, Tennessee.
• 1955 Auditions for producer Sam Phillips. Later that year he is signs with Elvis's label, Sun Records.
• 1957 Sun releases its first ever long-playing album, Johnny Cash With His Hot and Blue Guitar.
• 1958 Following a dispute over royalties Cash leaves Sun and signs to Columbia Records.
• 1960 Addictions to alcohol and amphetamines cause a souring of his relationship with his wife, Vivian.
• 1963 Ring of Fire, about his romance with June Carter, tops the country chart for seven weeks.
• 1965 Arrested on the Mexican border for attempting to smuggle amphetamines in his guitar case.
• 1967 Vivian divorces Cash.
• 1968 Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison is released as a live album. Cash proposes later that year to Carter.
• 1969 A Boy Named Sue becomes Cash's biggest-selling single.
• 1980 Inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
• 1994 The release of American Recordings brings him to a new audience. He plays the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival.
• 2000 Awarded Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
• 2003 June Carter Cash dies aged 73 after heart surgery, with Cash by her bedside. Cash dies four months later, aged 71, from
complications arising from diabetes.
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