Long before he grasped the nettle of fame, Joaquin Phoenix’s voice reverberated from every news channel and radio station across America. It started the morning after Hallowe’en, 1993, and in one of the most hideous examples of the mass media’s vampiric lust for sensationalism, Phoenix’s frantic 911 call as his brother, River, expired from a “speedball” overdose (a cocktail of cocaine and heroin) outside the Viper Room, Los Angeles, was relayed to a ravenous public. It is a night that will never escape him, but at last it no longer defines him.
“Tell it to somebody who cares, man!” Phoenix would heckle salacious hacks during his recent promotional rounds for Signs, his spiritually inclined new sci-fi thriller. He never talks about River; not to friends, not to directors, and especially not to journalists. The wound is still there, raw and open, and the barest, even circumspect, mention would be greeted with a deafening silence and intense glare from those wide green eyes. Quite often, it would spell the end of an interview.
You can see his point. Over the past couple of years he has emerged from the shadow of that dreadful night to become a star. Gladiator (1999) was his breakthrough, playing the snivelling Emperor Commodus, whose fey petulance was the perfect counterpart to Russell Crowe’s brute machismo.
He stoked the fire with the stark indie gangster thriller The Yards (2000), and an outstanding turn as a Catholic priest struggling to hold the Marquis de Sade in check in Quills (2000). His is a striking screen presence but, like everything about the actor, one alive with contradictions. Phoenix is not blessed with the pretty leading-man looks of Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt or, indeed, River, but neither is he a quirky character actor. He is something unique in modern Hollywood: his own entity.
“I guess it probably has to do with how I was raised,” he suggests. “My father would sit down and introduce me to guys that everyone else would run away from. He always saw humanity in each person.”
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While he defends his — now divorced — parents with a passion, your average therapist wouldn’t be hard pushed to find a link between an upbringing full of upheaval and tragedy and the volatile emotional make-up of the 27-year-old. He was born into the environs of the Children of God commune, and the family was dragged penniless around South America, singing God’s praises on street corners. Eventually disillusioned (the sect was later embroiled in tales of free love recruitment drives), they stowed away to Florida on a ship full of Tonks toys, in search of a new life.
“You know,” he sneers at insinuations of a troubled youth, “I didn’t realise until much later when journalists told me that I wasn’t normal that I didn’t have a normal upbringing. I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ It was news to me.”
It was his mother’s employment as a secretary at NBC that introduced showbusiness as the new family religion. She signed all her children up to an agent and after a series of adverts and minor television work, movies were to follow. Rechristening himself “Leaf” to align himself with his siblings’ nature themed monikers (Joaquin — pronounced “Waa-keen” — is his real name), he made a credible child actor in SpaceCamp (1986) and Parenthood (1989). Then he mysteriously dropped out for five years, setting off around the world with his father.
The comeback came in predictably powerful fashion in 1994, playing a brooding teen who is drawn to murder by Nicole Kidman’s avaricious weathergirl in To Die For, a media satire that carried serious connections with his brother’s tragedy: “Perhaps subconsciously,” he allowed. And the divide betwixt role and player has remained a blur of ruffled expression.
Tales of Phoenix’s extreme behaviour on set are rife. On The Yards he was found banging his head against his trailer wall to generate the requisite fury, on Gladiator he would drive himself to despair, bewailing his failure as an actor (“Don’t you always want to give as much as you can?”). It is impossible to place him: his non-conformity is part of an act, but it takes non-conformity to put it there.
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The Yards director, James Gray, seems to have some grasp of it. This is a supremely talented young man without a category; a troubled child whose grace is born of his awkwardness. “Joaquin is just his own kind of thing. He is his own mess. He is a happy and a beautiful mess. But he is a mess, nonetheless.”
CV: Joaquin Phoenix
Name Joaquin “Leaf” Phoenix
Born October 28, 1974, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Family His parents, John and Arlyn, were Bohemians, raising their children on the road. He has three living siblings: Rain, Liberty and Summer
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Married No, but he dated Liv Tyler for three years
High point Best Supporting Actor nomination for Gladiator in 2001
Strange fact Joaquin is a dedicated vegan right down to the clothing — no leather, no fur — which gives costume departments a headache.