Name: Joaquin Phoenix | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #598
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T16:13:47.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joaquin Phoenix | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #598' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joaquin Phoenix | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #598' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-18. Transcript available.

Joaquin Phoenix | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #598

Today's guest is a legendary actor, one of the greats, they'll say, I'll say it,
people are saying it, he's had so many amazing roles in The Joker, Walk the
Line, The Master, Signs, Eddington is his new film, which I got to take a peek
at before we got together.
We caught up at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, today's guest is Mr. Joaquin
Phoenix.
Yeah, do you have any, you okay with we start, Joaquin?
I am, why are you looking at the ground, what's going on?
I don't know, I just feel like I'm a little bit nervous.
Oh, because it seems like, it seems like the assassin, like before he's about
to fuck people up, he's just like staring, like getting in the zone, it's like,
let's do this.
So, I was like, okay, yeah, I mean, start, sure, man, start.
Okay, okay.
I think I'm waiting for like the coaches in my head to show up and be like, you
can do this, you know?
Wait a minute, you can do this.
You can definitely do this.
Thank you.
I'm questionable, but coach is like, he's questionable, we're not sure if he's
going to play.
Hey, that's not Jimmy Chitwood, okay, we got to sit that guy on the bench, you
know?
I don't know who that is.
Oh, it was the guy from Hoosiers, remember, who comes in and makes the show?
I don't remember.
Dang.
Thank you for telling me you don't remember instead of pretending like you do,
though, so I keep talking about it.
You're welcome.
Yeah, that's going to happen a lot.
There's a lot that I probably don't know.
Well, we're going to find out.
Thank you for your time, man.
No, thank you.
I appreciate it.
I really appreciate it.
And thank you for all your beautiful work over the years.
It's been nice to witness and consume as just a regular person in the world.
Oh, man.
Thank you.
You're very sincere.
It's very nice and refreshing and also slightly uncomfortable.
Yeah, sorry.
No, I know you're married, so I'll keep it just as sincere, you know?
We won't get physically sincere because that can be, it's outlawed in some
territories.
But no, thank you for your time, man.
And yeah, thank you for all the cool work and helping us think and stuff like
that just as viewers, you know?
Yeah, it's funny how sometimes like life or God or whatever uses like a person
as like an instrument, you know?
And yeah, you just have such a great way of like, yeah, just being able to do
something that we can't, so many people can't do.
But then it helps us, the rest of us, reflect on how we do things and live.
So does it make any sense even?
It's very nice.
I mean, I don't know.
All I'm hearing is, all I want to say is like, no, everyone can do it.
I don't have anything special.
Okay.
I don't do anything special.
Well, you're a lucky guy then.
Yeah.
You've been fortunate.
Yeah, I've been very fortunate.
I've worked with great, great people.
What'd you do this summer?
Did anything fun?
I feel like I was getting serious for a second.
No, no, no.
It was?
No, it wasn't.
Okay, good.
What did I do?
When does the summer start?
I guess the summer starts in, I would say mid, I would say June 1st.
June.
Okay.
No, nothing fun.
I just have this movie coming out, so we started, you know, I think somewhere
like the 10th
or something like that started press.
Okay.
So I did some press in LA and then flew to London and suppressed, so that's it.
Nothing terribly exciting.
Yeah.
But we're not like those kind of people.
We're not like, you know, like go vacation people.
That's not your life?
No.
Oh.
No.
Yeah, you always, I think when you picture like actors,
you always picture them in like a little bit of like kind of like a Rapunzel
castle
or like somebody's having shrimp, you know, like that kind of thing.
I think that's like a romanticizing of the, of the.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe I should.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe that's what's missing.
But, but no, it's not.
I mean, I have.
Yeah.
Like, but it's not a regular thing.
It's definitely not like, oh, here's summertime.
Let's, let's do that summer experience.
Got it.
But yeah, I have that.
Like fantasy sometimes.
Like sometimes I see myself like in slow motion and jumping off a pier
into a lake and shit, but I haven't done it yet.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So if you're not even living out the fantasies you're supposed to be doing,
then what the hell am I freaking sitting over here parading them around?
I don't know.
What do you, what do you do?
What do you do with your summer?
That's a great question.
What's your question?
Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks, dude.
Oh, this is a real pickleball game here.
I like it.
No, no.
No, no, it's good.
You're right.
I just didn't want credit for something.
It wasn't my question.
So I just felt like I had to acknowledge that.
No.
Well, well said.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I didn't, I think, yeah, I didn't do that much.
I just kind of like worked, I guess, and, oh, I did get to see my niece
graduated from high
school.
So that was pretty cool.
Just to watch somebody go through that moment where they're kind of like, you
know, where
the training wheels kind of come off of life a little bit, you know?
So I thought that was pretty neat.
And I watched Eddington the other day.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Really cool.
Cool.
I never graduated.
You didn't graduate high school?
No.
To be honest, I'm not sure I even made it to high school.
Right.
Okay.
That's fair.
Oh, damn.
That explains things so much better than, I think, watching you.
You're like, oh, this guy didn't even went to high school.
Right.
So.
Yeah.
I want you to have all the information.
Like, I'm an open book, and I just want you to really understand what you're
dealing
with here.
Okay.
As we move forward, okay?
Well, let's talk about Eddington first, because it was awesome, and it was just
like,
one of the neat things that I thought, and this is just me being kind of
judgmental just
so we can frame this for the conversation, is you want some water?
I was thinking about it.
I was deciding in my head.
I was going, how thirsty are you?
How much plastic do you want?
What are we going to do here?
Yeah.
That's what you saw.
So I was like, I looked at the bottle, and I said, it looks good.
I need the water, but it's got a lot of plastic in there.
Yeah.
And I was trying to decide.
No, no.
That just feels like, then I just feel like I'm.
No, I think you should.
Let's get in it.
I believe.
Look, I agree.
I think everybody's about to try to stop drinking out of plastic.
Right, but this is special water.
Oh, it's artesian?
That's nice.
It's nice.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's nice.
Oh, that came down on a Sherpa's back or something.
That was definitely.
So now that counteracts the plastic, I think.
Yeah, I think everybody's worried about microplastics and everything.
Recent studies have revealed that glass bottles now contain significantly more
microplastics
than plastic bottles.
Thank you so much.
I did not know that I was going to get an education here.
Thank you.
So crazy.
I like it.
Speaking of so crazy, man, let's talk about Eddington, dude.
It was so intense.
The stakes kept rising, because you have this, it's kind of like a time capsule
moment.
This is what I felt like.
To me, it felt like this time capsule moment from very recently, where you have
the COVID
mandates, you have the BLM movement going on, you have a change in the overlords
of media.
So now information is coming out of everywhere, right?
So there's a lot of new, but also errant information in the world.
You have all of these things happening at the same time.
Then you have this sheriff, Joe Cross, who's kind of like an authority figure,
right?
You know, that's who you look to when there's something going on.
But also at the same time, everyone's challenging authority.
So it's just, and then he starts to lose authority over himself.
So there's like, there's so much going on.
My question, I'm going to get to it too.
When there's so much going on like that, as an actor, are you thinking like in
each scene,
are you thinking, I have to embody all of these like little tributaries or at
once?
Or do you take that like scene by scene or moment by moment?
What's that like?
Because I mean, it got so intense as a viewer.
You're like, I don't even know if I can watch this, much less trying to be the
guy who's,
you know, spreading the jam, you know?
I think it probably, I think it changes.
I think there are days where you're probably hyper aware of the arc and you're
kind of like
following this trail that you're creating.
And there's other days where that gets in the way and you just go like, shut
the fuck up
and just like listen to what this other person say right in front of you and
just react to that.
Like we're not in our own lives, we're not always aware of like our arc, right?
So I think it's like, you're just trying to balance it out.
And sometimes you can be so in the moment that you do, you forget that it's
like you just came
and we're not, we're shooting the scene in six weeks, but you just have come
from whatever.
It's a, you know, intense emotional situation.
And now you're coming to this scene.
You got to, we have to carry that over.
So I think that it, um, it changes us like something that is just like,
uh, alive and moving and changing.
And of course you have like a partner, which is the director.
And in this case, the writer director, Ari Aster, um, who just like knows the
script,
obviously inside and out and the characters.
And we had been working, going through the script, you know, for a year prior
to shooting, um,
or we'd get together, um, who were actually in, in New York primarily and just
read through
the scripts, um, and talk about things.
So you're kind of going through and you're developing, you're developing the
character and you're
following this kind of plan that you have sometimes in your head, some things
you've discussed,
some things you're just spontaneously coming up with.
Um, and, and then you just, then you just hope for the best.
And then you just go, at some point you go, well, cause here's the thing, this
is the crazy
thing about it.
You'll like, you'll have this fucking plan that you're like, I'm fucking clever.
I figured this shit out.
It goes from this scene.
Then I go do that and that scene.
I'm doing that and that scene.
You have this brilliant fucking plan.
And you're like, I'm kind of like a genius.
And then in editing, they'll like pull two of those scenes out, like take them
out or like
put them somewhere else.
And then it's like, it's much better.
And you're like, I'm not a genius.
I don't fucking know anything.
Like if this shit works, it's because the fucking director, uh, is making this
work, you know?
So like, that's the, it's like, it's something very humbling about that process.
Right.
And you have to do the work, you have to do the work as if every moment is part
of this
character's life.
And then there's moments that aren't even in the script and on screen that you're
trying
to, I don't know, uh, think about and feel and kind of like take on as, as, as
your experience,
but you don't really know what's going to end up in the movie.
Um, so yeah, it's, it's, um, it's, I mean, it's a pretty cool experience.
It's, it's, it's kind of like life.
Yeah.
Like you need to plan all this shit and plan your day and your life and your
year.
And, and then shit happens.
It changes things get moved around and sometimes their characters, they just
get like, you're
taken out.
Yeah.
And sometimes you have a plan, like you're going to show up to like a something
and you're,
everything's going to be perfect.
You're going to have flowers for the, this, and you're going to have the best
thing to
say.
And then next thing you know, you're running late or you get there, your plane
gets delayed
and now you show up and you're the, you're, you're getting there as everybody's
leaving
and you're the last person and you brought the 30th thing of flowers and
everything's
different.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Can you tell at your, with your level of experience, can you tell when you
stuck the landing on
a scene?
Like, can