Last night, Joaquin Phoenix landed the Best Actor award at the Golden Globes for his extraordinary performance in Joker, a win that now places him as a serious frontrunner for the same prize at the upcoming Academy Awards. While this isn’t his first rodeo, having won the same award for Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line back in 2006, the 45 year-old has since been nominated three times without success, with his turn as Arthur Fleck breaking that duck.
Todd Phillips’ twisted psychodrama will also surely go down as the biggest hit of Phoenix’s career, having earned well over a billion dollars globally en route to becoming both the most profitable comic book movie and the highest-grossing R-rated feature ever made. With numbers like that, no shortage of controversy surrounding the build-up to release, and now some serious awards season momentum, Joker remains well established in the public consciousness, and the actor will likely have to field questions about it for the rest of his career.
However, Phoenix probably isn’t going to take that too well, based on his recent comments. In an interview immediately following his Golden Globe win, the Gladiator star admitted that he was starting to get a little tired of being asked about getting into the character of the Joker in every single interview that he does.
“Isn’t this old news? I feel like I’ve talked about this for six months. I mean, I feel like I answered these questions. You want to hear a different version of it? Should I try and change it slightly, or what should I do?”
While he did ultimately go on to answer the question, Phoenix eventually gave up and reiterated his point that he seems to have been repeating himself over and over, which is understandable given the sheer number of promotional work and awards season junkets a movie as successful as Joker requires.
“I read several books about clinical assassins that share a similar personality type to what I ultimately defined Arthur with. I’m not gonna say what they are, because I think those people have got enough attention, so I’d rather not mention them by name, the men I studied and based the character on. There’s probably so many other things that I just can’t remember right now. But I feel like I already answered this question six months ago.”
An actor like Joaquin Phoenix probably isn’t used to the amount of publicity that comes with being the star of a billion-dollar comic book movie, despite the relatively low budget and bleak outlook of Joker. Unfortunately for him, though, awards season is only getting started, so there’s going to be plenty more interviews to come.