NOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 149
about this and I can hear in your voice that
you’re trying to sound like somebody who
really cares and is interested, but let’s be
fucking frank about what’s happening here.’
It was just much easier to go, ‘Fuck you,’
which is an easier thing for me for whatever
reason, than to explain it.”
Nonetheless, his role as Cash deined
him as an actor with an uncanny power to
subsume himself in a role. “I think I had this
realization that the experiences I was hav-
ing as an actor were deepening, becoming
more profound to me,” he says of that role.
“There is this revelatory feeling, and it feels
like every step you’re dancing closer and
closer to the thing.”
Phoenix emphasizes that “the thing” is
not his brother’s death, not some Rosebud,
as in the childhood sled that unlocks the psy-
chic secrets of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen
Kane. “It’s one, it’s one of the Rosebuds,” he
says, “but it’s not a Rosebud in the way that
people think. At all.”
Instead Phoenix speculates that his a
n-
ity for characters like Arthur Fleck or Johnny
Cash derives from something more ineable,
a “cosmic angst,” possibly something “prena-
tal.” “I think there is a combination of nature
and nurture, obviously,” he says. “For whatev-
er reason—and some of it is my upbringing.”
But the topic of River remains sensitive.
Not even Phillips, who became good friends
with Phoenix over the course of making Joker,
ever felt comfortable enough to bring it up.
At one point, after I ask a question about the
Viper Room incident, Phoenix says, “You’re
such a great, decent human being. That
sounds like I’m being sarcastic. I am.”
This year, on the anniversary of River’s
death, Rain (to whom Joaquin aectionately
refers as a “fucking hippie”) will release an
album called River, inspired by his memory
and legacy. Before recording the album, which
includes a duet with Michael Stipe, she sought
the blessing of the family, including Joaquin,
whom Heart calls the “patriarch” of the fam-
ily, to address their private tragedy in public.
He understood her need to communicate her
experience. “She was right there, also, and so
I think there was a lot that was put on me,” he
says. “Then I was like, don’t fucking put that
on me. Just fucking—I’ll let you know if there’s
anything on me that we’re talking about.”
At the sushi joint, the magazine writer
makes an uncomfortable error, inquiring
about Phoenix’s dad: Where’s he living
nowadays?
“He lives in heaven,” Phoenix says atly.
Wait, where’s that? Costa Rica?
“No one’s ever been there,” he says.
He’s alive, right?
“Oh is he? Oh cool, great,” he says sarcas-
tically. “Let’s talk to him.”
In fact, Phoenix adds, his father died four
years ago of cancer, a development that
didn’t make the news. “Suddenly, there’s a
lot of holes in your research,” he says. “I was
going to say I wouldn’t joke about that, but
I actually would joke about something like
that. But I’m not joking.”
But he considers the entertainment value
of maintaining the ruse. “That would be so
fucked up!” he laughs. “I could also just keep
it up—‘I’m just fucking with you!’ ”
Later, in the parking lot waiting for the
valet to swing the Lexus around, he gives it
another go: “I was just kidding before. He’s
still alive.”
I wait a beat. “Really?”
“No, he’s dead. Sorry.”
(In fact, he did die.)
It’s that blurring of reality and ction that
Phoenix enjoys so well, like a little glimpse
from 2010’s I’m Still Here, which mixed Phoe-
nix’s real-life public persona with an invented
caricature of himself as a dilettante hip-hop
artist, a role he developed as a send-up of
Hollywood celebrity, complete with scenes
depicting “Joaquin Phoenix” pawing a naked
prostitute and snorting drugs. To this day,
some people believe he went through a person-
al meltdown a few years ago. “I did the junket
yesterday and a Brazilian guy said, ‘Are you still
doing good music or are you still rapping?’ ”
says Phoenix. “I said, ‘Are you serious?’ ”
The line between iction and reality in
I’m Still Here became even blurrier, how-
ever, when in 2010 two women, a producer
and a director of photography on the movie,
sued the director, Casey A£eck, for claims
that included sexual harassment and emo-
tional distress, with the women saying they
were told that Phoenix, along with A£eck,
used their bedroom during lming in Costa
Rica to engage in “sexual activity” with two
women. For a scene in the Palazzo hotel
in Las Vegas, the suits claimed there were
“several prostitutes, including male trans-
vestites,” present at an evening shoot, with
plaintis being told “none of the conduct
that occurred in the hotel suite is in the
version of the lm that will be released to
the public,” and claiming the behavior was
purely for A£eck’s “gratication.”
Phoenix and Affleck were brothers-in-
law at the time (A£eck was married to his
youngest sister, Summer), and the lawsuits
seemed to puncture an uncomfortable hole
in the lm’s ctional conceit, bringing up the
question of whether Phoenix is more like
the self-involved dude-bro depicted in the
movie than one would like to believe. The
two had met on the set of 1995’s To Die For,
and before A£eck married Phoenix’s sister
in 2006, they lived in the same building in
New York, enjoying Manhattan nightlife
together, and once got matching tattoos in
Italy, a black circle under the right arm.
Phoenix says his lawyers advised him not
to discuss the allegations against A£eck, who
settled the suits in 2010. Last year, Phoenixtold Xan Brooks from The Guardian that he
was sympathetic to victims of power imbal-
ances and expressed regret at not having
been more vocal about abuses of power he
witnessed in the past. While he wouldn’t elab-
orate on specics with a reporter, he makes
clear that he was not speaking speciically
about the A£eck case, and that he himself did
not witness sexual misconduct. What is clear
is that A£eck’s subsequent divorce from Joa-
quin’s sister had personal consequences for
Phoenix; he hasn’t spoken to A£eck “in many
years,” he says. “My sister and him divorced.
And I haven’t spoken directly to him or indi-
rectly in a long time. Three or four years.”Nowadays the line between ction and real-
ity has never been more porous. Last sum-
mer, Universal Pictures canceled the planned
release of the lm The Hunt, a “satirical social
thriller” about a ictional human hunting
ground, after the recent mass shootings in
El Paso and Dayton. Though it’s based on
a comic book character, Joker is uncomfort-
ably close to current events as well: the story
of a lone gunman with his own righteous
rationale. Phillips is sensitive but fatalistic
about the topic of copycat violence. “We’re
making a movie about a ctional character
in a ctional world, ultimately, and your hope
is that people take it for what it is,” he says.
“You can’t blame movies for a world that
is so fucked up that anything can trigger it.
That’s kind of what the movie is about. It’s
not a call to action. If anything it’s a call to
self-reection to society.”
When he took on the role, Phoenix says,
he had to determine whether he could bring
complexity and humanity to an ostensibly
evil person.
“I was going through [the script] and I
realized, I said, ‘Well, why would we make
something, like, where you sympathize or
empathize with this villain?’ It’s like, because
that’s what we have to do. It’s so easy for us
to—we want the simple answers, we want to
vilify people. It allows us to feel good if we
can identify that as evil. ‘Well, I’m not racist
’cause I don’t have a Confederate ag or go
with this protest.’ It allows us to feel that way,
but that’s not healthy because we’re not real-
ly examining our inherent racism that most
white people have, certainly. Or whatever it
may be. Whatever issues you may have. It’s
too easy for us and I felt like, yeah, we should
explore this villain. This malevolent person.
“There’s no real communication,” he con-
tinues, “and to me that’s the value of this. I
think that we are capable as an audience to
see both of those things simultaneously and
experience them and value them.”
For now, Phoenix and Phillips are satis-
ed that they’ve slipped something that feels
like auteur cinema under a tentpole usually
reserved for blow-’em-up teenage fare—they
pulled o the heist. Phillips tears up when he