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Wed 29 July 2026 5:00, UK
Method acting has undoubtedly produced some incredible performances over the years, but when an actor tips too far over into their character, and when life starts to imitate art, things can get quite dangerous, as Joaquin Phoenix discovered in an Oscar-nominated role.
In some respects, it might well be that the part of hard-drinking, hard-living, sometimes drug-addicted country music icon Johnny Cash could have been one of the worst choices Phoenix could have made as an actor, given the background and circles he grew up in, what with being the brother of the late River, who died from an overdose, and coming from a family born into a religious cult.
But he was just into his 30s by 2005 and had shunned much of the celebrity lifestyle, even after a star-making turn in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator that earmarked him as a major talent, winning Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for his performance as Commodus, the power-hungry son of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, determined to see Russell Crowe get publicly munched on by tigers.
So he may have felt perfectly positioned to take on the role of Cash in the biopic Walk the Line opposite Reese Witherspoon, which told the story of The Man in Black’s upbringing, his ascent to country music fame through touring the US in the 1950s, his troubled relationship with June Carter and his battle with substance abuse. Cash himself even approved of Phoenix’s casting before he died a year before production commenced.
But he discovered that the process of immersing himself in Cash’s world proved a challenge, to say the least, and even after wrapping up the movie, he struggled to return to daily life. Not long after filming, Phoenix told the New York Times, “It was really hard for me to leave that movie. I was angry and hurt and felt abandoned. I didn’t know what to do. To play Cash, I had learned a whole new way of functioning in the world, and suddenly, I couldn’t rely on that anymore.”
Phoenix, like Cash, turned to alcohol in order to cure the boredom, explaining, “You go into a space of not having a routine to your day, of not knowing what you’re going to say, and it’s like, ‘Who are you? What are you?’ It’s so easy to have a drink to just feel OK about being nothing.”
Although he would later say that he didn’t need an intervention and that he was just enjoying being hedonistic as a young, successful actor in Los Angeles, Phoenix nevertheless checked himself into rehab to be treated for alcoholism. Within 12 months, though, he almost died after crashing and flipping his car on a winding canyon road, during which he was, bizarrely, pulled out of the wreckage by legendary film director Werner Herzog, who had to stop the actor from lighting a cigarette while petrol was pouring into the damaged vehicle.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
In the two decades since, Phoenix has emerged as one of the greatest actors of his generation, thought of along the same lines as De Niro and Day-Lewis were before him. He has added two more Academy Award nominations to the ones he collected for Gladiator and Walk the Line, winning for his maniacal work in Joker in 2019.
After a divisive last movie with Ari Aster’s Eddington in 2025, Phoenix’s next film is likely to be another collaboration with Lynne Ramsay, who directed him in 2017’s harrowing thriller You Were Never Really Here. The latest one is called Polaris, and is a horror set in late 1800s Alaska, co-starring Rooney Mara.
