The “half-made, fake-ass” movie that Joaquin Phoenix still called “fucking brilliant”
It’s somewhere between cruelly ironic and morbidly funny that Joaquin Phoenix spent his entire career avoiding lead roles in big-budget blockbusters like the plague, and when he finally crossed that Rubicon, the results were nothing short of disastrous.
To be fair, he’d had a pretty good track record in expensive mainstream projects before Joker: Folie à Deux. He first dipped his toes into those waters with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, even though he tried his hardest to back out, and ended up with an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
M Night Shyamalan’s Signs and The Village combined to earn over $650 million at the box office, and while Todd Phillips’ Joker wasn’t a massively pricey film, it was still based on one of the most iconic characters in popular culture, and was technically a comic book adaptation, albeit in the loosest sense.
Of course, the R-rated psychological drama cleared a billion dollars in ticket sales and won him the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’, but increasing the budget of the sequel to a reported $200 million and turning it into a musical didn’t seem to go down well with many critics or viewers, with the exception of Quentin Tarantino.
It’s the costliest production he’s ever been a part of, and since he declined Marvel’s overtures to play the title character in Doctor Strange and replaced Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in The Avengers, and it’s said that he also declined the part of DJ in Star Wars: The Last Jedi that was played by Benicio del Toro, it may well stay that way for the rest of his days.
Phoenix doesn’t care for effects-heavy spectacle flicks, and that’s perfectly OK, because he’s not alone in that regard. And yet, despite savaging that entire arena of filmmaking and repeatedly stating that it’s something he has zero interest in as a performer, he revealed that he absolutely loved one particular example.
Speaking to Miami New Times, the star downplayed his abilities, saying that “anyone could give a great performance with the right script and the right director.” To illustrate his point, he brought up the ensemble cast of JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot, describing their performances across the board as “fucking brilliant.”
In his mind, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldaña, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, Eric Bana, and the rest of the gang deserved more praise because “it’s even more difficult to stand with a half-made, fake-ass fucking set with some weird fucking wig and say a bunch of technical dialogue, and not have the benefit of people going, ‘Well, this is important work, so let’s give it space!'”
As far as compliments go, it seems a touch back-handed. That said, Phoenix had nothing but the utmost praise for the people who populated Star Trek; it was just the way it was made that he couldn’t quite wrap his head around as the most serious form of thespianism.
