As an interview subject, Joaquin Phoenix is like a 1940s high school basketball team: after a few minutes, he gives up trying to score and starts running out the clock. Phoenix is most comfortable discussing his approach to acting--a tortuous, self-invented method that involves avoiding people or things that remind him he is not the character he is trying to play. Eventually, having exhausted his favorite subject and parried the introduction of any other, he announces that time's up. The defensive victory is his. At least he's a good sport. During a moment alone with the tape recorder, knowing he will not be heard until later, Phoenix leans in and whispers, "Boring you to death. I know it. My apologies."
The 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. At the end of a bewildering interview on The Tonight Show a few years ago, Jay Leno asked if Phoenix might "be here in person next time."
The 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 and an interesting actor. Gus Van Sant (To Die For), Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and M. Night Shyamalan (Signs, The Village) all fought to cast him in crucial supporting roles, and on Nov. 18, Phoenix will finally get to show what he can do with a movie on his shoulders. In Walk the Line, he plays and sings the life story of the late Johnny Cash opposite Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash. "I should have a good answer for why I wanted to play him," says Phoenix. "An answer about his life and the impact he had on American music, but, uh ..."