No joke, Joaquin Phoenix might be our greatest living actor

Joaquin Phoenix might best be described as the anti-Tom Cruise. You won’t see him playing clean-cut, all-American heroes. He doesn’t jump off planes or perform motorbike stunts. Nor does he have Cruise’s wraparound grin. When he does smile, as in his Oscar-winning turn in Joker (2019), the effect tends to be more chilling than charming. The closest he’s come to being a conventional leading man was when he played Jesus (in 2018’s Mary Magdalene) and, earlier, when he played Johnny Cash (in 2005 biopic Walk the Line). Typically, he excels in roles that require either snarling malevolence or wounded self-pity – or a mixture of both.

These qualities are in evidence in Ridley Scott’s epic new biopic Napoleon, released in cinemas later this month. It promises to be another barnstorming turn from one of Hollywood’s most unlikely stars. Phoenix’s Bonaparte has a quiet arrogance, an unshakeable belief in his status as a man of destiny – and yet he is also a strangely awkward and diffident figure, aware of his humble Corsican background and obsessed with his beloved Josephine (Vanessa Kirby).

It is not the first time Phoenix has played an emperor in a Ridley Scott movie. Back in 2000, he was cast as Commodus, who succeeded Marcus Aurelius on the throne of imperial Rome in Scott’s Gladiator. The actor brought his familiar mix of understated malice and Machiavellianism to the character.

“He is not the physically imposing type one might have envisioned in the role, but he conveys the complexities of this corrupt ruler in a very courageous way,” Scott noted. “He exposes the vulnerability that is juxtaposed with the ruthlessness of Commodus.” It was an astute remark that got to the heart of the actor’s technique. Even when he is playing cruelty and brutality, Phoenix still appeals to an audience’s sense of pity. He is like a dog with an injured paw.

There can be something feral about Phoenix on screen. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), he was cast as the hard-drinking, sex-crazed war veteran Freddie Quell, who comes under the guidance of cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

“The thing about Joaquin is that he’s incredibly unpredictable,” Anderson observed in 2013. “There’s so much energy around him, he’s like dynamite. I wouldn’t say he’s scary. I’d say he’s thrilling, sometimes a bit maddening.” Hoffman, a formidable actor in his own right, admitted that one of the main attractions of working with Phoenix was that “he scares me”.

Phoenix appeared in The Master despite having announced his retirement from acting in 2008. He’d told the media he wanted to pursue a career as a rap artist instead. A few months later, when he was interviewed on The David Letterman Show, Phoenix turned up bearded, dishevelled and in sunglasses. As he maniacally chewed gum and gave a series of mumbling, incoherent answers, his host likened him to the Unabomber. Even more than a decade later, it isn’t entirely clear whether this was a situationist prank, or whether the actor really was close to breakdown.

In Casey Affleck’s bizarre mockumentary I’m Still Here (2010), in which he “played” himself, Phoenix continued to maintain the pretence that he was giving up Hollywood for a new career in hip-hop, a field in which he clearly sucked. Although the documentary received respectful notices at Venice Film Festival and was regarded by some as a clever send-up of the media’s morbid obsession with celebrity scandal, others seemed to worry whether the actor and director were playing a joke on them. It didn’t help that Affleck was later sued for sexual harassment by the film’s cinematographer and one of its producers (the case was settled out of court).

Phoenix’s career appeared to be imploding. But while his erratic foray into the world of hip-hop at first seemed like a deliberate act of self-sabotage, it ended up giving him a new kind of credibility. No critic would ever be able to mock him as effectively as he had mocked himself. He’d made it very clear that he didn’t care about maintaining a wholesome public image, freeing him up to take any role on offer. He has always been courageous both in his choices and in his approach to screen acting. He’ll bare his soul as a matter of course, and take on the type of toxic character that other Hollywood stars will often shun.

“That’s why I have such hesitation and fear about working, because I know that I am probably going to have to experience public humiliation and I don’t want to,” he told his sisters Rain and Summer Phoenix on a 2019 episode of their podcast LaunchLeft. “I know that, for me, nothing is going to come of the work unless I have that experience.”

Phoenix researches roles in forensic detail. When he was getting ready to play Arthur Fleck in Joker, he studied everything from childhood trauma to the knock-on effects of antidepressant drugs on the mentally ill. He reduced his diet to 500 calories a day, becoming rakishly thin. “I think you become aware of your body in a different way,” he reflected on his intense Method-style approach. It also saw him watching videos of people subject to extreme fits of laughter.

Two weeks into shooting, the actor completely changed his performance. Todd Phillips, the film’s director, went along with his star, aware that Phoenix was pushing himself to the limits. “There was a point I realised ‘This is wrong,’ and I had to go into work and tell the make-up, hair, wardrobe and everybody ... and say I f***ed up,” Phoenix later admitted. “I want to change the hair, the way I’m wearing the clothes. I had to admit I was totally f***ing off. I was so humiliated.”

From that low point, Phoenix arrived at an interpretation of Fleck that ended up winning him an Oscar. He was equally striking two years earlier, playing the bulky, bearded, very violent private investigator in Lynne Ramsay’s dark thriller You Were Never Really Here (2017). It won him the Best Actor award at Cannes Film Festival.

Phoenix’s enigmatic behaviour only adds to the public’s fascination with him. He is in a relationship with another movie star, the Carol actor Rooney Mara, but they’re one celebrity couple that shirks the limelight. He gives everything when he is acting, and yet can be awkward and evasive off screen. He has been known to walk out of interviews in response to what he perceives as hostile questions, most notoriously when film critic Robbie Collin asked him in 2019 if he thought Joker could inspire real-life violence.

His reticence has the effect of making the public want to know even more about him. Collaborators, though, speak of him fondly. Derek Jacobi, who co-starred in Gladiator, described him as “one of my muckers” and suggested he was good company during the many breaks between shooting in Malta. Watch him on The David Letterman Show after he shaved off his beard and stopped behaving like the Unabomber, and he is likeable and articulate.

It’s strange to think now that this most mercurial of screen actors began his career playing one of the kids in Ron Howard’s wholesome family comedy, Parenthood (1989). He was only 15 years old but was still asking searching questions of his director, complaining to Howard about the costume he was being asked to wear. “It was suggested that I wear a denim jacket with a lot of pins in it,” he once said. “I remember thinking, ‘That is not who he is.’ I remember being so overwhelmed and angry about being told that was what I had to wear.”

Phoenix has asked equally searching questions of almost every other director he has worked with since then. He chooses new projects on the basis of the filmmaker behind them, not the role he is being offered, and he expects a little creative friction. His older brother River, who died 30 years ago in late October 1993, was a teen idol who seemed like a contemporary Huck Finn in films such as Stand by Me (1986) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). In comparison, the younger Phoenix is a far darker presence on screen.

If you were looking for his equivalent in the Hollywood of the old studio era, you’d turn to a character actor like Peter Lorre, the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Humphrey Bogart’s very slippery friend Ugarte in Casablanca (1942). Lorre had the same feline quality, the same tendency towards melancholy, and a similar ability to show rage and cruelty at the drop of a hat.

The difference between Phoenix and Lorre is that Phoenix is a star. He may be drawn to playing brooding, dysfunctional characters and may only occasionally go near the mainstream, but his movies have still grossed well over $1.4bn (£1.14bn) in the US alone.

Now, the Oscar-winning actor is starring in a huge-budget historical biopic. As ever, he is approaching the role in his own eccentric way. Phoenix’s Bonaparte doesn’t even attempt to put on a French accent. The actor clearly regards the French military genius as another of his gallery of sensitive and misunderstood outsiders. Napoleon’s military adventures may have left millions of dead scattered across Europe, but as played by Phoenix, he is still a figure of pathos and wry humour, and even a misunderstood romantic.

“We found that he’s a split personality,” Scott recently said of Napoleon in an interview with The New Yorker – using words that could equally well be applied to Phoenix. “He is deeply vulnerable, and while doing his job he’s able to hide that under a marvellous front. His forceful personality was part of his theatre.”

Rupert Everett’s blustering Duke of Wellington dismisses him as a verminous egotist, but by the time Napoleon comes unstuck at Waterloo, it’s a fair bet that most audiences’ sympathies will be firmly on his side. That’s Phoenix’s secret. In his best screen performances, even when he is cast as the darkest of characters, he plays them so tenderly that you can’t ever hold their villainy against them.

‘Napoleon’ is in cinemas from 22 November