Fade To Black

By Josh Tyrangiel / Los Angeles

As an interview subject, Joaquin Phoenix is like a 1940s high school basketball team: after a few minutes, he gives up trying to score and starts running out the clock. Phoenix is most comfortable discussing his approach to acting--a tortuous, self-invented method that involves avoiding people or things that remind him he is not the character he is trying to play. Eventually, having exhausted his favorite subject and parried the introduction of any other, he announces that time's up. The defensive victory is his. At least he's a good sport. During a moment alone with the tape recorder, knowing he will not be heard until later, Phoenix leans in and whispers, "Boring you to death. I know it. My apologies."

The truth is that Phoenix is warm, polite and, yes, quite dull--perhaps even willfully so. Unlike other aspiring leading men, Phoenix, 31, is intent on being a nonentity off-screen. He does not talk about whom he might be dating, walk red carpets or volunteer dilettantish political opinions. His brother was River Phoenix, the icon of lost potential, but he refuses to discuss any feelings he has about River's 1993 death from a drug overdose. Joaquin is humble and self-deprecating, although not comically so, and when pressed to reveal anything about himself, he often retreats into incoherence. At the end of a bewildering interview on The Tonight Show a few years ago, Jay Leno asked if Phoenix might "be here in person next time."

The price of failing to come up with an acceptable public persona--one that emits a few rays of personality while keeping a semblance of privacy--is that Phoenix is rarely anyone's first choice as a leading man. (The studio logic is that if you can't open up for five minutes on a talk-show couch, you probably can't open a movie.) He accepts that without anger. "I never wanted to be a salesman," Phoenix says. "It's not what I do." Luckily for him, there are directors who recognize the difference between an interesting interview and an interesting actor. Gus Van Sant (To Die For), Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village) all fought to cast him in crucial supporting roles, and on Nov. 18, Phoenix will finally get to show what he can do with a movie on his shoulders. In Walk the Line, he plays and sings the life story of the late Johnny Cash opposite Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. "I should have a good answer for why I wanted to play him," says Phoenix. "An answer about his life and the impact he had on American music, but, uh ..."

Phoenix tries hard to be a blank slate, but his actual biography is quite juicy. He was born (with that distinctive scar over his lip) in Puerto Rico to parents who were missionaries for the religious cult Children of God. By the time he was 8 years old, the family had moved to Los Angeles, where his mother was a secretary in the office of an NBC casting director, paving the way for Joaquin's debut on the series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Phoenix worked consistently until his early teens but quit acting after appearing in Ron Howard's Parenthood. "Movies like that are few and far between, and I knew there wouldn't be anything else worthwhile for an actor my age," says Phoenix. He was offered, for instance, a cross-generational buddy movie with Married with Children's Ed O'Neill, "but there was a lot of bananas in tailpipes and things like that. It didn't ring true, and I had a sense of wanting to explore true stories and true emotions. Even when I quit, I'd make up characters and scenarios and practice them alone. I knew that I would act again."

Phoenix dropped out of school after ninth grade and finished his teens traveling in Latin America. When he returned to acting five years later, he earned raves as the mumbling killer in To Die For and an Oscar nod for his weaselly turn as Commodus in Gladiator. Walk the Line director James Mangold says both performances were seared into his memory. He noted that Phoenix looked like the young Johnny Cash, but he was more intrigued by another resemblance. "That incredible vulnerability and masculinity that James Dean had," says Mangold, "Joaq has the same thing. His face is complicated, and it's hard to find someone who can communicate complication."

Mangold, who worked extensively with Cash on the Walk the Line script (see box), could not imagine doing the movie without Phoenix. The actor, in turn, could not imagine passing on the role. "I had been desperate to disappear into a character completely," he says. Mangold believed that for the film to be authentic, the actors needed to play and sing, not rely on looped music. "With all due respect, I don't think of Natalie Wood's performance in West Side Story as one of the hallmarks of musical cinema," says Mangold. (As for Ray, 2004's biopic about a drug-addicted music legend from the South, which used looping, Mangold says, "I don't think I want to go there.") Phoenix, who had no musical background, figured he would learn to play the same way Cash did, without formal lessons. He bought a guitar and asked a friend to teach him some chords.

It was not quite that simple. Cash was 6 ft. 2 in. and held his guitar like a long rifle, with his strumming arm draped around the bottom of the body. Phoenix is 5 ft. 8 in. When music supervisor T-Bone Burnett told him his basic mastery was all right but his strumming was all wrong, it took weeks to relearn how to play. There was also the matter of singing. Phoenix has a warbling, slightly nasal voice that needed extensive training to hit Cash's rumbling lows. "He was pretty horrible when he started," says Dan John Miller, leader of the indie band Blanche, who plays Cash's lead guitarist, Luther Perkins. Phoenix spent months rehearsing by himself, even writing his own songs to "see what it felt like to make something from nothing." When he arrived in Memphis three weeks before shooting began, he brought only a few white T shirts and borrowed the rest of his clothes from wardrobe. Then he shut out anyone and everything that reminded him that he was Joaquin Phoenix. "He came around the corner for this concert scene," recalls Miller, "and he just had the swagger and confidence. He was Johnny Cash--badass. For an amateur like me, it was suddenly clear what real acting is."

Every time he finishes a movie, Phoenix says, he has a difficult time readjusting to life. "You relinquish all these things that are familiar to you and start living according to the character, and then all of a sudden it ends," he says. "There's months of 'What the f__ do I do now?'" After Walk the Line, Phoenix checked into an alcohol-rehabilitation center amid reports that playing Cash, who was haunted by the loss of a much-loved brother as an adolescent, had stirred up unresolved feelings about his own brother. Phoenix finds that laughable, although he doesn't laugh. "There was a lot made of my going to rehab, and it seems very dramatic, but it wasn't like that. I just became aware of my drinking as a tool to relax when I don't work. I basically went to a country club where they didn't serve alcohol." As for the notion that he overempathized with Cash's loss, he says, "That's simplistic. I never think about my similarities to a character."

In two hours of conversation, Phoenix tells one story that is personally revealing. As it happened, Phoenix was invited to a dinner party with Johnny Cash long before he knew he might one day play him. Cash and June sang Far Side Banks of Jordan, and then, Phoenix recalls, the Man in Black cornered him and said, "'I really like that film you did, Gladiator. I love the part where you said'--and he did a better reading than me--'Your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross, and your wife moaned like a whore when they ravaged her again and again and again!' Within minutes of looking into his wife's eyes and singing like an angel, he turned into this ogre. We all have those two sides, but it was just so cool that he wasn't ashamed of it." Pausing to think back on the moment, Phoenix continues, "I don't feel like I knew him well after that dinner, but it was cool to say that I knew a little bit about him." That's all most people ever ask.