The scene Joaquin Phoenix refused to shoot: “Who the fuck would do that?”
Method actors can be a prickly bunch at the best of times, and even though he’s got the awards and acclaim to support his credentials as one of his generation’s finest, Joaquin Phoenix has also cultivated a reputation for getting cold feet at the worst possible moment.
Confidence and belief in a project shouldn’t be something the Academy Award winner finds difficult to find, especially when he happily put his career on hold for years and came dangerously close to sabotaging it entirely when trying to maintain the illusion that he really was turning his back on Hollywood to try his luck at becoming a bearded and bedraggled rapper.
That’s without mentioning the Todd Haynes movie that Phoenix single-handedly torpedoed when he decided he didn’t want to play the lead role anymore, a decision that killed the production in one fell swoop when he was the one who originated the idea and took it to the filmmaker, only to leave the cast and crew hanging on location when he backed out at the last second.
Ridley Scott also revealed that Phoenix was ready to abandon his Oscar-nominated performance in Gladiator until Russell Crowe was forced to play peacemaker, and the situation reared its head again under almost identical circumstances two decades later with the same director at the helm when he suddenly got trepidatious over the title role in Scott’s Napoleon.
On the plus side, the scene he flat-out refused to shoot was a one-time incident during a film that otherwise went off without a hitch, even if the sequence was lifted from source material that a lot of people would rather Hollywood didn’t deviate from in the slightest so as not to cause widespread offence.
Playing Jesus is a tall order and a tough task for any actor, but Phoenix drew the line at a moment in the script where he was supposed to instantly remedy a woman’s blindness by rubbing dirt right in their eyeballs. It’s literally in the Bible, but he wasn’t too keen to replicate it on the screen.
He’d made up his mind before the cameras were even rolling, too: “When I got there, I thought, I’m not going to rub dirt in her eyes.” Why? For a very simple reason. “Who the fuck would do that?” The answer was, of course, Jesus, but Phoenix had no interest in grabbing a handful of dirt and thrusting it straight into the peepers of another actor.
What would Jesus do? Well, he’d indulge in a little mud therapy because that’s what was postulated in the Bible. What would Joaquin Phoenix do? Refuse to shoot the scene as a matter of principle, making a mockery of the well-worn saying in the process.
