The scene Joaquin Phoenix apologised for shooting: “I’m so sorry, this is not me”
I’ve often thought that one of the most impressive abilities that leading actors have is that they are able to do what they do, remember lines, emote, tell a story, move around on cue and hit their spots, to make us forget we’re watching a movie.
They do it all while worrying about the millions of dollars, the complex equipment, the thousands of jobs and the hopes of the cinema-going public resting on the outcome. That kind of pressure makes the kind of performances Joaquin Phoenix regularly puts in even more spectacular.
Across a period of around 25 years he has placed himself firmly among the acting greats of any era, the millennial equivalent to a Al Pacino or a Cary Grant, racking up fantastic films including Gladiator, Her, Joker, Walk the Line and The Master, while putting in performances that teeter on the bridge of worrying amounts of immersion, earning four Oscar nominations and one win.
Yet some of his most memorable work have been on the films that flew under the radar somewhat, rather like the director he has worked with on four occasions, James Gray. There’s the superbly dark vigilante film from Lynne Ramsay, You Were Never Really Here, from 2017, his first film with Ari Aster, 2023’s Beau is Afraid, or the film which is probably the best of his movies with Gray, 2014’s The Immigrant co-starring Marion Cotillard.
However, according to Gray, shooting that film wasn’t a good experience for the famously intense Phoenix, with the director revealing to Salon, “He was miserable. He was great, by the way. Maybe as good as he’s ever been, but he was miserable on set. We would shoot a scene, and he would walk up to Marion and say, because he loves Marion, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry’.”
A period drama set in New York City in the 1920s, The Immigrant tells the story of Cotillard’s young Polish woman who arrives on Ellis Island after escaping war in Europe and meets Phoenix’s character Bruno, who offers her help and somewhere to stay, only to end up prostituting her for money.
Gray continued, “There was one scene we did where he [Phoenix] felt so horrible that he had to hide in his dressing room for hours. He couldn’t come down. He kept saying to Marion, ‘I’m so sorry, this is not me, it’s not me’. Because of the position the movie puts him in, he was very uncomfortable playing that part. Extremely uncomfortable.”
While the film was critically acclaimed and won several industry awards, it did not fare well in cinemas, partly due to the director unwilling to bend to demands being made by a pre-MeToo Harvey Weinstein. Phoenix, meanwhile, moved swiftly on to the Spike Jonze-directed, uber-prescient movie Her, and then the following year was again acclaimed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.
Most recently, he appeared in another Ari Aster film, last year’s small-town Covid comedy drama Eddington, which didn’t fare well at the box office either.
He’s now working on two new projects, firstly, The Island opposite Rooney Mara, about a couple moving to a remote location only for a millionaire to make them accidental stars, and then Polaris, which will mark his second collaboration with Lynne Ramsay, a supernatural tale set in the late 1800s that sees an Alaskan photographer confronted by the Devil himself. Hopefully, he’s less apologetic at this point about taking menacing turns against beloved costars; it’s all a part of the job.
