‘I’m Still Here’ May Have Been a Hoax for the Ages, but Joaquin Phoenix’s Multiyear Performance Was No Joke
As part of our best movie performances of the 21st century package, we’re looking back at a meta-joke that may have been the most fascinating example of Method acting we’ve ever seen
I thought it was real, anyway. It was January 2009, and there was a video going around of Joaquin Phoenix falling offstage during the live debut of his new rap persona. I doubt I’ve ever clicked on anything faster in my life.
At this point, Phoenix hadn’t yet gone on Letterman and carried out one of the most memorable interviews in television history, or made headlines for charging into an audience to fight a heckler, or announced an upcoming feature-film documentary about his transformation directed by his then-brother-in-law Casey Affleck. Before the evidence really started to stack up, Phoenix’s declaration that he was quitting acting to pursue hip-hop seemed, while perplexing, quite plausible. Celebrities make strange decisions all the time. For as many reasons as you have to doubt an actor when they casually tell an Extra reporter that they’re done with it all, you have just as many—if not more—reasons to believe them.
The Best Movie Performances of the Century
I’m sure I wondered, as I watched (and rewatched) the video of Phoenix tumbling into a sofa, if this was all a setup of some kind. If this was some form of experimental Method acting performance for an unannounced part. But the grainy flip-phone-ass footage of Phoenix, heavily bearded and plumply disheveled, fit so naturally into the developing landscape of the internet—was so voyeuristic and cheap and amusing—that it was easy to put that aside. In a word, the performance was convincing—and not just to me.
After I’m Still Here, the mockumentary about Phoenix’s heel turn, finally came out almost two years later in September 2010, many people watched it while continuing to nurse the impression that it was truly, alarmingly real. There had been persistent rumors that the film was a hoax, a bit, an art project—or whatever term would most appropriately describe an A-list actor faking an extended breakdown of some kind—but very few knew for sure. And because the film was shown to the press in the few weeks prior to Affleck coming clean about the whole affair to The New York Times, most of the (largely negative) initial reviews consisted of critics writing themselves in circles, venting their frustration over not knowing whether they were being fucked with or not.
“All of this is true,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. “At least we must assume it is. If this film turns out to still be part of an elaborate hoax, I’m going to be seriously pissed.”
Watching I’m Still Here 15 years later, it’s somewhat baffling that any film critic—let alone the greatest one who ever lived—walked away thinking it was a genuine documentary. For every moment in the film that seems relatively earnest, there are 10 others that are almost slapstick. “Tobey and fucking Leo are on a fucking jet, man, and we’re in a fucking minivan!” Phoenix yells during one of his many diatribes against his exhausted entourage. There’s then a brutal silence in the car, which Phoenix fills by rapping, terribly, before hitting a pipe full of what is hopefully weed. The movie practically vibrates with this kind of spastic comedic energy for nearly two hours. It’s like This Is Spinal Tap turned up to 11.
One explanation for how so many critics walked away from screenings still trying to figure out whether it was a goof or not is that they were working with so much more than just the literal film. Prior to watching the 108 minutes of I’m Still Here, those of us who were following the spectacle actually spent 21 months with “JP,” Phoenix’s rap persona. In that period, JP kept popping up, bringing the stage with him in a series of appearances that tricked the public into becoming characters and camera operators and critics in an ongoing, improvised piece of shape-shifting art, satirizing not just filmmaking but celebrity and the media and himself. During what should have been the beginning of the prime of his professional career, Phoenix instead committed to being a narcissistic, idiotic dirtbag everywhere he went. Well before the movie came out, many of us just accepted that this was who he had become.
It also helped that the stakes weren’t imaginary, either. Phoenix quite legitimately hijacked and torpedoed the press campaign for his supposedly “final” film, Two Lovers, a thoroughly tasteful drama that would eventually limp its way toward settling for a cult audience. The film’s director/cowriter, James Gray, called Phoenix a “clown” and a “crazy person” while trying to salvage the rollout of his movie, and it appears he was serious. “I have no idea what the hell that guy is shooting,” Gray said in his own Two Lovers press interview, in reference to Affleck. “The whole thing is not to my taste, and I’ve let Casey know this.” (Phoenix later made nice by appearing in Gray’s next film, The Immigrant.)
But it wasn’t just Phoenix’s commitment to the character that made it convincing—it was also that the character was built upon a foundation of legitimacy. It’s easy to forget now that Phoenix has mellowed some and achieved that rare, hyper-elevated status that allows him to be picky with media appearances, almost trolling the press with which outlets he decides to talk to in any substantive way. In the time before I’m Still Here came out, though, Phoenix was still carrying a well-earned reputation for being standoffish and difficult to reporters. “I don’t believe you’ve ever cried in your life,” he told an interviewer in 2003 who said she cried during Brother Bear, the kids’ movie about an animated bear they were there to discuss. (Phoenix was upset at a joke she had made to start the quick, low-stakes junket sit-down.)
And while most of I’m Still Here is staged or scripted, of course, some of the footage is a little hard to believe as 100 percent “fake” just the same. The drugs that Phoenix snorts off a woman’s breasts were surely a prop, for example, but I’m willing to bet the cigarettes he’s chain-smoking throughout were as real as the ones he chain-smokes in real life. JP is a character, a clown, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t built from exaggerated flesh-and-blood elements of Phoenix’s real self. “Certainly, that was a period when things felt very stressful for me,” Phoenix told The Guardian in 2018. “I wanted out. I wanted my fucking life back. So, yeah, there was a bit of crossover there.”
Presuming that there are kernels of truth baked into I’m Still Here, certain elements have become increasingly difficult to stomach. A central figure of the movie is, of all people, Diddy, whom Phoenix is (pathetically) attempting to secure as a producer for his record. Nothing resembling what Diddy stood trial for this year takes place in the film, but with hindsight, watching him play for laughs feels twisted beyond belief, even for a movie that was already pitch black to begin with.
And the year the film was released, two women in the crew—producer Amanda White and cinematographer Magdalena Gorka—said Affleck had sexually harassed them, and they each filed a lawsuit against him. Affleck initially denied their accounts, and the cases were settled out of court. But it’s easy to visualize the type of inebriated, chaotic, abusive environment the women described in their lawsuits, because it sounds quite similar to the one that’s frequently depicted in the actual film. In 2018, Affleck retroactively admitted responsibility for an “unprofessional environment” on set and publicly apologized.
Before the ruse was revealed, the nagging fear many viewers had while watching I’m Still Here was that this could be fake—that they were being tricked. But the nagging fear you might have watching the movie now is that some of this might be real.
“Method acting” is a bit of a misnomer for what people think about when they hear that term—Daniel Day-Lewis staying in a wheelchair while making My Left Foot, or Lady Gaga spending the better part of a year speaking in an Italian accent for House of Gucci.
Lee Strasberg, the so-called “father” of Method acting, outright said that this kind of extreme, extended immersion into a character was not Method. As to what is Method, there are competing schools of thought, but broadly speaking, it refers to actors finding a way to understand their characters to the degree that they inhabit them as they perform rather than just pretend to be them. And for someone like Strasberg, anyway, the techniques to accomplish this were relatively contained, such as the controversial “affective memory” approach, in which performers tap into memories of real, personal events that mirror the emotions of their characters, allowing them to deliver a performance that’s less faking and more being.
The Method mindset really picked up steam in the middle of the 20th century, when performers like Marlon Brando brought a revolutionary realness to their roles, and over time, that approach evolved (or maybe the right word is metastasized) into something that production assistants around the globe have learned to shudder at. Robert De Niro gaining all that weight for Raging Bull, Christian Bale losing all that weight for The Machinist, Jeremy Strong refusing to stop being Kendall Roy at literally any time, Daniel Day-Lewis learning how to hunt for The Last of the Mohicans or make dresses for Phantom Thread or locking himself in solitary for In the Name of the Father—these are extravagant twirls added to the more straightforward dance of Method acting. Call it Method if you want, but it’s something more than that, and the severity of the approach often gets under the skin of people who have to coexist on set with these actors. Just ask Laurence Olivier or Brian Cox.
But audiences love that stuff. What an actor does outside the footage that makes it into the film or show really shouldn’t have any bearing on the perceived “quality” of their performance; it should be self-explanatory, right? That’s simply not how it works, though. Since the dawn of Hollywood, audiences have been infatuated with the outside personalities of their favorite film stars, and commitment to a part so intense that it borders on lunacy is apparently one of the most reliable ways to win over fans and critics. Any kind of long-term inhabitation or physical/emotional transformation for a role invariably generates interest and allure—and often awards. So why, then, were people so dead set against Phoenix’s approach in I’m Still Here, which could in some way be considered the Ultimate Method Acting Performance?
“The release was too clever by half,” Matt Damon told The New York Times Magazine in a 2013 profile of Affleck. “You have to tell [the public] that it’s a joke because they will not forgive you if they’re not in on the joke.”
A central paradox of I’m Still Here is that the element of it that’s most interesting—the wild level of commitment to the bit by Phoenix and Affleck, to the degree that they both seriously risked their careers—is also what most aggravated critics and audiences. Perhaps the movie would have been more generously received if the reveal had been made before it was released, but with a project that functions as a meta-commentary about the phoniness of the Hollywood machine, the filmmakers had to commit all the way through for the best effect. Looking at it from some distance, the act of leaving the critics out to dry just long enough for them to publish their reviews is the cherry on top of one of the greatest pranks in film history. (My favorite line from one of those reviews is from Sam Adams, writing for Philadelphia City Paper: “If it’s an act, then Phoenix is crazier than if it’s for real.”)
“We really just painted ourselves into a corner,” Phoenix told Interview magazine in 2012, remembering the escapade. “That was a really uncomfortable feeling for me, though. I thought Casey and I had actually achieved ultimate success with I’m Still Here, if your definition of success is completely destroying your career—which was somewhat the intent. But doing that movie was one of the best things that I’ve done and that I’ll ever do.”
It was a rough landing, no doubt, but good art—especially good comedy—often pisses people off at first. And the backlash to the movie didn’t hold either of the filmmakers down long, obviously. Phoenix said he believed his I’m Still Here performance was specifically why he got the job from Paul Thomas Anderson to play Freddie Quell in The Master. And, it appears, it was also what won him the respectful fear of one of the all-time greats in Philip Seymour Hoffman: “I remember Phil saying, ‘Joaquin scares me, in a good way,’” Anderson told The New York Times in 2012.
In that same Times feature, Phoenix said the experience of I’m Still Here—particularly the night he had to rap for a real club audience and then aggressively throw himself offstage toward a friend who was pretending to be a heckler—helped him find a new gear as an actor. “Going out on a stage publicly and not knowing how people are going to react to you,” Phoenix said, “once I experienced that, it made me feel much more comfortable about going into a scene.”
Rather than retiring from acting, as he had threatened, Phoenix ended a four-year hiatus from traditional roles by showing up to a powerhouse production in The Master. (Retiring, my ass.) Rejuvenated, he continued pushing the limits in terms of his acting approach, staying in character on set—going Method, you could say. But this time, he gave the people (and the critics) what they wanted: a safe, understandable form of eccentricity. Soon he’d receive his third Oscar nomination for that role, and to this day it’s the role that may define him. All was forgiven—or maybe forgotten.
It would be a shame to forget, though, because I’m Still Here is worth remembering not just for the hilarity of watching Phoenix aggressively rap in Edward James Olmos’s face but also because it legitimately did poke the wasp’s nest of the entertainment industry in a justifiable way. Sometimes this whole Hollywood thing is just … a bit much, right? The black-tie events, the limos, the media scrums, the acceptance speeches, my God. There’s often a suffocating level of gluttony and entitlement lingering around all of it, even when it’s for the purpose of hyping up films about nothing more than animated bears or aliens or Johnny Cash. And Phoenix, who has routinely spoken about how much he despises the performative charade and self-importance of the industry, was absolutely onto something by parodying this world—especially considering the way that digital media has, in the ensuing years, ballooned the parasocial dysfunction of the very nature of “celebrity” at large.
When Phoenix returned to Letterman in 2010, just after the hoax was revealed, he explained that I’m Still Here was intended to be a project that “explored the relationship between the media and the consumers and the celebrities themselves.” He said he had been watching a lot of reality television, offering a hint at what his stunt was really all about, and he “was amazed that people believe them—that they call them ‘reality.’ I thought the only reason why is because it’s billed as being real and the people use their real names. But the acting is terrible.”
Letterman nodded and quickly changed the subject. He was less interested in interrogating the difference between fiction and reality within the entertainment industry than he was in making sure people knew that he was not in on this whole act to begin with—that he hadn’t betrayed his audience’s trust in a way they’d hold against him:
Letterman: Now, did I know anything about this?
Phoenix: No.
Letterman: Was there a script that you and I were working with?
Phoenix: No.
Letterman: Thank you very much. I was not a part of it, was I?
Phoenix: Like you said, you’ve interviewed many, many people, and I assumed people would know the difference between a character and a real person. But I apologize. I hope I didn’t offend you in any way.
Letterman: Oh, no! I was not offended. I’m telling you, it was so much fun. It was batting practice!
Fast-forward to 2017, though, and Letterman would admit to Howard Stern that he had, in fact, been in on Phoenix’s joke all along. “I knew what he was doing ahead of time,” Letterman said, lovingly comparing Phoenix’s appearance on Late Show with those of Andy Kaufman decades earlier.
Letterman had been so adamant before that he’d had nothing to do with it. But it’s useful to not be naive about the fact that just like Phoenix in I’m Still Here—just like a reality TV star, or a late-night audience member, or a film actor doing a press junket—Letterman, too, was just playing a part.