dawned on him that the sh his parents
had been feeding him back in Venezuela,
where they lived in a beach house and sang
praise songs to God on the streets, were
actually these helpless, apping creatures
being tortured to death on deck.
“It was so violent, it was just so intense,”
he recalls. “I have a vivid memory of my
mom’s face, which—I have seen that
same face maybe one other time, where
she was completely speechless because
we yelled at her. ‘How come you didn’t
tell us that’s what sh was?’ I remember
tears streaming down her face.... She
didn’t know what to say.”
Two months later, after moving to
Winter Park, Florida, the entire fam-
ily converted to veganism. In 1979 they
piled into a station wagon—with a new last
name, Phoenix—and drove to Hollywood,
where they reinvented themselves as an
unlikely troupe of child actors and singers
who appeared in TV shows like Family Ties
and Hill Street Blues, espoused veganism
and animal rights, and featured a beautiful
eldest son, the shooting star River Phoenix.When Joaquin Phoenix unsheathes his
chopsticks for the seaweed salad at Asane-
bo, the Japanese restaurant in Studio City,
this story adds to the queasy feeling that
the actor may be oended by the platter
of raw mackerel that shows up at the table.
“Dude, do your thing,” he shrugs,
casual in a black T-shirt and rolled-up
pants, graying hair slicked back. “Not
everyone is as evolved.”
He’s kidding. Maybe. With an impish
smile, he lets the comment hang. “It’s
up to you,” he says, and then bursts into
maniacal laughter: “It’s so fucked up!”
Later, he tells me to “enjoy your swas-
tika” before stepping out for a cigarette.
Phoenix’s moral intensity and sense of
comedy—that laugh—dene his talent
as an actor, along with a sense of vulner-
ability. In his latest role, as Arthur Fleck
in the psychological comic book drama
Joker, he transforms himself into a tor-
tured and mentally unstable loner driven
to highly inhumane acts of violence—
against humans—in pursuit of a quixotic
stand-up comedy career. On camera his
cackling laughter, sheepish grin, and
slow-blinking eyes channel unexpected
heartbreak and humanity in a DC Comics
villain from Batman—in fact, erasing any
trace of comic books and instead present-
ing a character study of a fevered vigilante
suering from mental illness, alienation,narcissism, and latent rage. Directed
by Todd Phillips as an homage to grimy
1970s and ’80s classics, especially those
made by Martin Scorsese with Robert De
Niro (who costars), the lm’s artful depic-
tion of an alienated white man perform-
ing acts of nihilistic savagery has already
rekindled the conversation over the rela-
tionship between Hollywood violence and
the real-life kind seen last summer in El
Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
After the Venice Film Festival, where
Joker premiered, a ery debate erupted
over the movie’s nuanced depiction of
a character not unlike the “involuntary
celibates,” or incels, behind recent mass
shootings. Suddenly, the lm’s likeness
to Taxi Driver reminded those with long
memories that Scorsese’s 1976 lm par-
tially inspired the would-be assassin John
Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in- Variety called Joker “the rare comic
book movie that expresses what’s happen-
ing in the real world,” but Richard Lawson,
writing for Vanity Fair, expressed another
common sentiment, that it might be “irre-
sponsible propaganda for the very men it
pathologizes.” In Venice, Joker took home
best lm, which likely would have been
more controversial had Roman Polanski
not won the Grand Jury Prize. “I didn’t
imagine that it would be smooth sailing,”
Phoenix says of the press reaction. “It’s a
di¤cult lm. In some ways, it’s good that
people are having a strong reaction to it.”
Phoenix mostly wants to let the lm
speak for itself. “There’s so many dier-
ent ways of looking at it,” Phoenix says of
the Arthur Fleck/Joker character. “You
can either say here’s somebody who, like
everybody, needed to be heard and under-
stood and to have a voice. Or you can say
this is somebody that disproportionately
needs a large quantity of people to be x-
ated on him. His satisfaction comes as he
stands in amongst the madness.”
Phoenix has always had an intuitive feel
for the dark side of the human psyche. In
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really
Here, from 2017, he played a damaged hit
man who kills rich men who rape under-
age girls by hitting them with a ball-peen
hammer. Before that, in Spike Jonze’s
Her—during which he met his ©iancée,
costar Rooney Mara—he was a lonely
depressive who nds love in his comput-
er’s operating system. In 2010, he um-
moxed everyone by playing a semictional
version of himself as a self-destructive
actor trying to build a hip-hop career for
Not long before we drive to his favorite
sushi bar in Los Angeles, Joaquin Phoe-
nix, the actor, tells the story of how he
became a vegan.
It was October 28, 1977, his third birth-
day, and Phoenix and his family were
aboard a cargo ship bound for Miami from
Venezuela. His parents had just aban-
doned their lives as followers of a noto-
rious religious cult, the Children of God,
which was led by a charismatic former
preacher named David Berg, who called
himself Moses. Phoenix’s parents, who
spent much of the late 1960s wandering
the West Coast in a VW microbus, had
become missionaries, traveling around
the southern U.S., Venezuela, and Puerto
Rico, and giving birth to Rain, Joaquin,
and Liberty along the way. To sing about
God, Rain and rst-born River went busk-
ing on the street. The organization made
Phoenix’s parents “the archbishops” of
Venezuela and Trinidad.
In those years, Children of God had
not descended fully into the darkness and
perversion for which it became infamous,
including the use of sex for recruitment
and allegedly introducing children to sex
at a young age. The family was far from
Berg’s orbit. When they realized what
was happening, the Phoenixes, whose
last name was then Bottom, left the cult,
disillusioned, penniless, and expecting a
fth child, Summer.
The freighter was carrying a container
with Tonka toys, and the crew gave Phoe-
nix a truck and made him a birthday cake.
“I vividly remember this cake, and I think
it was probably the rst cake that I ever
had, like a proper cake,” Phoenix says. “I
remember the toys. I had never gotten a
new toy before, and really the most jar-
ring and intense memory was what led
to our veganism.”
He and his older siblings, River and
Rain, were watching ying sh leap out
of the water when Joaquin observed some
shermen pulling their catches o their
rods and throwing them violently against
nails that had been pounded into the wall
of the vessel. At that moment, he says, it
96 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019