Over the course of his career, Joaquin Phoenix has established a reputation as a performer, and it’s not for taking on chill characters and projects. He has a serious dedication to his work, and that has regularly lured him to play serious and/or complicated characters in complex and/or intense films. Writer/director Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid is the latest example of this, with Phoenix playing the anxiety and fear plagued titular antagonist, and while you’d think that he’d might want a break from that kind of exhausting material, you definitely shouldn’t expect to see him in a light romantic comedy any time soon.
Joaquin Phoenix and Ari Aster took part in a virtual roundtable earlier today in advance of Beau Is Afraid hitting theaters last week, and the actor was asked during the conversation if the kind of work he’s been doing takes a toll and if he’d be interested in doing a bit of a career pivot and signing on to make a rom-com. It was an idea that Phoenix didn’t exactly embrace, saying,
I don't know. I mean, I enjoy it. No, a romantic comedy seems boring. I can't imagine three months shooting something that just doesn't feel like it has a lot of substance. But I don't know, maybe it would be enjoyable. But I think for me sometimes, honestly, I think I sometimes dislike the entire machine of making movies so much that, if I didn't have to really be focused and feel like there was something at stake… I just probably wouldn't show up.
I would actually make the argument that Joaquin Phoenix stars in what is one of the best romantic comedies of the 21st century – writer/director Spike Jonze’s Her – but with that film’s heady themes about technology and loneliness, that’s obviously not the kind of rom-com to which he is referring in this conversation.
Eliciting laughs from the room, Phoenix continued,
So I think if I did a romantic comedy, I think after a week I'd just be so fucking bored. For an actor you have to have a costume and makeup and it's like you have to say hello to people. It's like... it's gross. Like saying, 'Good morning' to like 50 people. It sucks.
There is certainly nothing boring about Beau Is Afraid. The film is Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary and Midsommar, and it stars Phoenix as Beau, a permanently anxious man who lives in a world of worst case scenarios and finds himself confronting a seemingly never ending series of challenges and horrifically bizarre circumstances as he tries to take a guilt-ridden trip home to see his mother. You can watch the wild trailer below:
Watching the movie, you can’t help but feel like Joaquin Phoenix must have been completely wiped at the end of the day on set, having spent hours in a near-constant state of high tension – and he hypothesized that his body can’t differentiate between fiction and reality. He says that it does have an impact on him beyond his work, but he has no interest in stopping because he enjoys it:
I think your body doesn't really know the difference between like imagined horror and something it's really experiencing. I think a lot of times you probably do take on some of that anxiety, and not in some like fucking bullshit method way, but just the nature of it. I mean, I know the same thing for, for Ari, right? When you're talking about these things, inevitably it has an impact on you. But, but yeah, honestly, I enjoy it. I enjoy pushing my myself. High stress situations are enjoyable to me.
Co-starring Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Richard Kind, Patti LuPone, Armen Nahapetian, and Zoe Lister-Jones, Beau Is Afraid arrives in theaters on April 21, and as I wrote in my CinemaBlend review, it’s an experience akin to a three-hour panic attack. As early reactions demonstrate, it’s going to be one of the most divisive movies of the year, so give it a watch and judge it for yourself.
For a further look ahead at what’s coming out in coming weeks and months, check out our 2023 Movie Release Calendar.
