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It was not quite that simple. Cash was 6 ft. 2 in. and held his guitar like a long rifle, with his strumming arm draped around the bottom of the body. Phoenix is 5 ft. 8 in. When music supervisor T-Bone Burnett told him his basic mastery was all right but his strumming was all wrong, it took weeks to relearn how to play. There was also the matter of singing. Phoenix has a warbling, slightly nasal voice that needed extensive training to hit Cash's rumbling lows. "He was pretty horrible when he started," says Dan John Miller, leader of the indie band Blanche, who plays Cash's lead guitarist, Luther Perkins. Phoenix spent months rehearsing by himself, even writing his own songs to "see what it felt like to make something from nothing." When he arrived in Memphis three weeks before shooting began, he brought only a few white T shirts and borrowed the rest of his clothes from wardrobe. Then he shut out anyone and everything that reminded him that he was Joaquin Phoenix. "He came around the corner for this concert scene," recalls Miller, "and he just had the swagger and confidence. He was Johnny Cash--badass. For an amateur like me, it was suddenly clear what real acting is."
Every time he finishes a movie, Phoenix says, he has a difficult time readjusting to life. "You relinquish all these things that are familiar to you and start living according to the character, and then all of a sudden it ends," he says. "There's months of 'What the f__ do I do now?'" After Walk the Line, Phoenix checked into an alcohol-rehabilitation center amid reports that playing Cash, who was haunted by the loss of a much-loved brother as an adolescent, had stirred up unresolved feelings about his own brother. Phoenix finds that laughable, although he doesn't laugh. "There was a lot made of my going to rehab, and it seems very dramatic, but it wasn't like that. I just became aware of my drinking as a tool to relax when I don't work. I basically went to a country club where they didn't serve alcohol." As for the notion that he overempathized with Cash's loss, he says, "That's simplistic. I never think about my similarities to a character."
In two hours of conversation, Phoenix tells one story that is personally revealing. As it happened, Phoenix was invited to a dinner party with Johnny Cash long before he knew he might one day play him. Cash and June sang Far Side Banks of Jordan, and then, Phoenix recalls, the Man in Black cornered him and said, "'I really like that film you did, Gladiator. I love the part where you said'--and he did a better reading than me--'Your son squealed like a girl when they nailed him to the cross, and your wife moaned like a whore when they ravaged her again and again and again!' Within minutes of looking into his wife's eyes and singing like an angel, he turned into this ogre. We all have those two sides, but it was just so cool that he wasn't ashamed of it." Pausing to think back on the moment, Phoenix continues, "I don't feel like I knew him well after that dinner, but it was cool to say that I knew a little bit about him." That's all most people ever ask.