Phoenix’s mental torment

Joaquin Phoenix is wound a little too tight, said Sanjiv Bhattacharya in Esquire. Known for his intense performances, the 39-year-old actor so immerses himself in his roles that he had to check into rehab in 2005 after playing the brooding, drunken country music legend Johnny Cash. Phoenix tried so hard to be Cash that he didn’t know what to do with himself when it was over. “I get crippled by my own thought process,” he says. “I don’t know my craft. I was thinking the other day, what happened? I don’t deserve to be here!” Before filming begins on every movie he’s cast in, he says, he has “weeks of incredible anxiety. They have to put pads in my armpits because I sweat so much it drips down my wardrobe. It matters so much to me to impress the director.” Directors and fellow actors admire his intensity and his devotion, but Phoenix waves off any pretense about his profession. “When you see an adult actor on a set, they look infantilized. People are there to dress you. they bring you espressos and lattes. It’s like arrested development.” What he fears most, he says, is getting sucked into the Hollywood bubble. “If you ever take your jacket off on set and just hold it out while you’re talking to the director because you expect a wardrobe person to grab it—that’s when it’s time to go home. It’s over. You’re no longer a human being.”

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