“It’s just so stupid”: when Joaquin Phoenix refused to condone his own method acting
Method acting is something of a controversial practice; there’s no doubt that it has given us some of the finest performances in cinema history, but it is also regularly decried as spectacularly narcissistic and pretentious, and stories of actors refusing to break character on set for weeks on end are plentiful. Joaquin Phoenix is often described as method, and there’s no doubting his quality, but at least he has some self-awareness about it all.
The idea behind Method acting, that it helps an actor immerse themselves entirely in a character so that their emotions and psychology and motivation are completely taken on, is one thing, but in practice it can be a very different, and very annoying practice. You only have to imagine the faces of Jared Leto’s costars on the Suicide Squad set when they opened ‘gifts’ from him, including used condoms, rats and bullets, because he had ‘become’ the Joker.
But then there’s the flip side of it, Robert De Niro for instance becoming a licensed New York cabbie in preparation for his Oscar nominated performance in Taxi Driver, or Christian Bale having to be told not to lose any more weight after he dropped six stone on a diet of just one apple and a tin of tuna for his role as the lead in 2004’s The Machinist.
Phoenix is certainly no stranger to that kind of behaviour, after all, this is the man who gave a monosyllabic retirement interview to David Letterman in front of millions and was ridiculed for years for it, only for it to turn out to be a ‘bit’ for his rap mockumentary I’m Still Here, something for which he would later apologise. He also trained at a firefighting academy before making 2004’s Ladder 49, and was another actor who, like Leto and Heath Ledger, went to ridiculous lengths to inhabit the mind and mannerisms of The Joker.
Perhaps the most extreme physical preparation Phoenix underwent for a role came on 2012’s The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, in which he played a WW2 veteran with mental health issues. While the posture he adapted for the role, a kind of twisted stance, was adopted from an early issue he had in real life, he went much further to effectively show a speech impediment on screen.
He told NPR’s Fresh Air: “I actually went to my dentist, and I had them fasten these metal brackets to my teeth, on the top and the bottom. And then I wrapped rubber bands around it to force my jaw shut on one side… this was in the beginning, before we started shooting. And after a couple of weeks, the bands, they just weren’t, they weren’t really strong enough to kind of hold it. And so I ended up just getting rid of the rubber bands”.
Adding: “I still had these metal brackets in, so it made me constantly aware of my cheek, you know, and they had these pointy tips, so they would tear up the cheek a little bit… Why am I talking about this? It’s not interesting. It’s just so stupid.”
In the end, though, Phoenix’s discomfort was probably worth it; he was nominated for a slew of industry awards for his performance, including an Oscar nod and a Golden Globe nomination. Like many of PTA’s films, The Master has become more and more appreciated as time goes by, now considered one of the finest movies of the 2010s.
Meanwhile, Phoenix, who is notoriously picky with his roles, will appear in a new Lynne Ramsay movie called Polaris opposite Rooney Mara, which will be scored by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who composed the music for PTA’s One Battle After Another.
