Word: phoenix
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...