Joaquin Phoenix's starring role in Joker certainly wasn't his first high-profile — and high-paying — movie gig. His Oscar-nominated stint as Johnny Cash in 2005's Walk the Line earned the actor about $3.5 million, according to Men's Health, and he supposedly stuffed his pockets with a healthy $5 million for his turn in M. Night Shyamalan's The Village in 2004. Those are wonderful numbers, but they preceded the great Phoenix flop of 2010. We're talking about the mockumentary, I'm Still Here.
That money pit of a project was directed by Casey Affleck, who was Phoenix's brother-in-law at the time. The film followed Phoenix's huge-hoax-nobody-understood "rap career," but it flopped hard, bringing in less than $100,000 its opening weekend, according to The Telegraph. In Hollywood money, that's pocket change, and the stunt almost thrust Affleck into bankruptcy. "I went broke. I hadn't worked for more than a year, and I was pouring money into the movie," he told The Telegraph.
"It felt like there was no way we could do this without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars," Phoenix told Time. He seems to view that financial gamble from a glass-half-full perspective. "I wanted to put myself in a situation that would feel brand-new and hopefully inspire a new way of approaching acting. It did do that for me."
Okay, Joaquin. Whatever it takes. You are definitely still here in a big way.
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