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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's Parenthood. "Movies like that are few and far between, and I knew there wouldn't be anything else worthwhile for an actor my age," says Phoenix. He was offered, for instance, a cross-generational buddy movie with Married with Children's Ed O'Neill, "but there was a lot of bananas in tailpipes and things like that. It didn't ring true, and I had a sense of wanting to explore true stories and true emotions. Even when I quit, I'd make up characters and scenarios and practice them alone. I knew that I would act again."
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, and it's hard to find someone who can communicate complication."
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 a drug-addicted music legend from the South, which used looping, Mangold says, "I don't think I want to go there.") Phoenix, who had no musical background, figured he would learn to play the same way Cash did, without formal lessons. He bought a guitar and asked a friend to teach him some chords.