Joaquin Phoenix He has a reputation for being a difficult actor to work with, something he himself has acknowledged in interviews. Recently, the interpreter made headlines for abandoning the new film Todd Haynes when there were five days left to start production and he should not have made it easy for Todd Phillips in the development of joker (2019) and Joker: Folie à Deux (2024).
Now, coinciding with the premiere of Gladiator II, A clash has resurfaced between Phoenix and Russell Crowe during the filming of the first film, in which the actor played Commodus. The Oscar-winning production released in 2000 earned Phoenix an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, but when he started working on the role, he didn’t have it all.
In a recent interview with New York Times, the director Ridley Scott has recalled the altercation between Phoenix and Crowe on set after the former became nervous. “[Joaquin] He was in his prince’s suit saying: ‘I can’t do it,’ the filmmaker recalled: ‘I asked: ‘What?’ AND Russell said: ‘This is terribly unprofessional.’
The journalist wanted to know how Scott managed to convince Phoenix that he would stay and the filmmaker explained: “I can act like an older brother or a father. But I am quite close friends with Joaquin. Gladiator “It was a trial by fire for both of us at the beginning.”
Joaquin Phoenix in ‘Gladiator’
In 2018, Phoenix gave an interview to Collider in which he already shared the pressure he suffered in Gladiator. “I feel that nervousness in every movie… But Gladiator It was one of the most intimidating because the first set I entered was huge,” he said, and he himself admitted feeling overwhelmed: “It seemed like miles of land, tons of trucks and trailers, hundreds of extras, and multiple cameras. Suddenly, Its scale shocked and overwhelmed me. “I didn’t think I was capable of doing it.”
Phoenix said that, after feeling overwhelmed, he went to talk to Scott: “I said, ‘I don’t know what to do, I can’t do this. I don’t know what we’re going to do. This is not going to be possible.’ And Ridley was very smart. He shot with me for four hours without film in the camera… I wasn’t going to waste it.”
Finally, Phoenix managed to overcome the impact that the production of this blockbuster had had on him and gave us one of his most celebrated and remembered performances even today. Scott, for his part, must not have had such a bad time with the interpreter because he counted on him again in Napoleon (2023).
Curiously, the actor once again hesitated about whether or not to participate in this second collaboration until Paul Thomas Anderson, with whom he had worked in The Master (2012) and pure vice (2014), came on board to help with the script. “Tommy was doing Licorice Pizza and advising me how to do Napoleon”, Scott recalled in the same interview with New York Times: “It was a lot of fun. The three of us in a room screaming with laughter.”
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