Interview: Joaquin Phoenix on ‘Eddington’
Ari Aster is no stranger to making divisive films. His debut feature, 2018’s Hereditary, may have been a box office hit that accumulated an incredibly passionate fanbase that still sings its praises to this day. However, it received some of the lowest scores in test screening history and was met with a D+ CinemaScore from audiences upon its release. His follow-up film Midsommar also split audiences down the middle; hailed by some as a modern horror masterpiece and dismissed by others as slow, indulgent or just plain weird. His third film Beau Is Afraid, which featured an unhinged, no-holds-barred performance from Joaquin Phoenix, was no exception. A three-hour descent into anxiety and absurdity that refused to dumb itself down or handhold its audience, it left viewers either shaken, confused, angry or all three simultaneously, But that push-pull reaction has always been part of Aster’s appeal. He makes films that linger, provoke, and get under your skin whether you want them to or not. And with Eddington, he has made what is likely to be his most divisive film yet.
Eddington is a western set in May 2020, when a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg in Eddington, New Mexico, pitting neighbor against neighbor as political tensions ripple through the community. As the COVID-19 pandemic reaches its peak, the citizens of Eddington find themselves increasingly divided over everything from mask mandates to curfews. The conflict comes to a head when both men announce their candidacy in a contentious mayoral race, one that quickly becomes personal. Old wounds resurface, including a long-buried history between the mayor and the sheriff’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), turning an already fractured town into a battleground. As the pressure builds, the sheriff struggles to keep the peace. And keep his own life from falling apart in the process.
With Eddington, Aster expands his usual scope of dread, shifting from intimate psychological horror to something far more collective. Set during the early months of the pandemic, the film unfolds against a backdrop of mask mandates, protests, online disinformation and mounting social paranoia. What begins as a local dispute between two individuals gradually spirals into a larger, more unsettling portrait of a town where no one seems to be living in the same reality. It’s a story about half-truths and the death of empathy. What happens when a community starts to lose patience with one another and begins to unravel from the inside out. Eddington holds a cracked, dusty mirror to its audience and asks them to confront not just the chaos of that specific moment in time but also the lingering disquiet it left in its wake.
At the center of the film is Joaquin Phoenix, who stars as Eddington‘s sheriff, Joe Cross. Much like Beau Wassermann, his character in his previous collaboration with Aster, Beau Is Afraid, Joe is filled to the brim with anxiety. Anxiety over his fraying relationship with his wife Louise. Anxiety over his weakening position of power as the sheriff of the town. And anxiety over his upcoming mayoral race against Ted Garcia, Eddington’s incumbent mayor who is running for reelection. But unlike Beau, Joe is not paralyzed by that anxiety. He’s bumbling, often misguided and frequently out of his depth. But he moves through the world with a stubborn confidence that is probably what allowed him to become sheriff in the first place. Where Beau crumbles under the weight of his fears, Joe charges past his, often to his own detriment.
As Joe, Phoenix delivers one of his best performances yet, approaching the role with so much empathy for a character that has little to no empathy for the world himself. Which, as it turns out, was entirely by design. During a roundtable interview during the press tour for the film, Phoenix spoke about how his goal was to challenge how a character like Joe might typically be perceived. “My intention was to humanize Joe as much as possible,” he says. “I hoped that anybody that might come in with some preconceived idea of who a conservative sheriff in a small town might be like — I wanted to kind of challenge those ideas, at least initially.”
Joe is an incredibly difficult character, one that audiences will have a tough time trying to sympathize with. He’s stubborn, reactionary, and at times, completely oblivious to how he’s being perceived. But in Phoenix’s more than capable hands, he feels nuanced, complex and most importantly, incredibly human. “I have to say, I ended up feeling a great deal of warmth for Joe,” says Phoenix of his approach to playing the character. “There’s a certain sadness… It’s disappointing, the way he allows all that dissatisfaction and frustration and pain to manifest. He reminds me of so many people in the real world — in those critical moments that we all kind of face. Like, what kind of person are we going to be?”
Phoenix says he worked with Aster for months to develop Joe as a character, collaborating with costume designers and dialect coaches on everything from his uniform to the way he speaks. He tried out different voices and dialects until he found one that clicked. “We started working together and reading through the script a year in advance,” he says. “When I was reading it, I just heard this voice. But I didn’t know how to physically bring it out. I’d try things, we talked to a dialect coach, and we were like, what are we even doing?”
It wasn’t until the first official day of shooting, however, that things started to lock in. “I was really nervous. I felt like there was something missing from the scene, but I couldn’t identify what it was exactly. I just knew it had to do with acknowledging something, right after I make the announcement to be mayor,” he recalls. “So I’m standing in front of the chalkboard, practicing my lines. Ari’s next to me doing the same. And he kind of made this gesture — he put up his hands, almost like, ‘I’m sorry.’ And I just thought, that’s Joe. Joe’s always trying to stop the world. Everything is falling — his relationships, his idea of what it means to be a man, to be American, to be in power — and he’s just constantly putting up his hands going, no, stop, it’s gonna be okay.”
Even Joe’s look wasn’t locked until the last minute. In early prep, Phoenix and Aster took a trip to New Mexico, where they met with local sheriffs and mayors. One man in particular ended up standing out to Phoenix. “He just looked amazing,” he says. “He was wearing the white shirt and jeans and boots. I took some pictures of him — didn’t really plan on using it. But then I went to New Mexico to start prepping, and Anna [Terrazas, the costume designer] had these sketches — the traditional brown uniform and then the look from the photo. We were leaning toward the brown one, but I asked if she still had the white shirt and jeans. She did. And then during the camera test, I pulled up the photo of the sheriff again — he had these glasses. I said, ‘Do you have anything like this?’ We put them on, and we all just went, oh, that’s it.”
Still, costume and voice were only part of the picture. The real work happened in the dynamic between Joe and those around him, particularly Pedro Pascal’s Ted Garcia, the town’s current mayor and Joe’s former friend. “There’s like four major scenes with us, maybe,” Phoenix says. “But they’re full of conflict and rumor and hurt feelings and insecurity. It always felt like I was the beneficiary of the environment or the production design — like it was pushing us to be in a certain space.”
One early scene takes place at Ted’s bar, with the two men separated by a pane of glass. “When I read the script, I didn’t register that. I thought I was supposed to go around and talk to him. But when I got there, I couldn’t — because the lodge was going to come in through the door. So we had to stay on opposite sides of the glass,” he says. “It just felt like the perfect metaphor — that there’s something between us, blocking us from really connecting.”
That emotional distance becomes even more pointed during a supermarket confrontation, just before Joe announces his campaign. While shopping for groceries, Joe stumbles upon a situation where one of the townspeople is refusing to wear a mask indoors, much to the supermarket staff’s frustration. You can easily guess which side Joe is on and which one Ted, who also happens to be at the same supermarket, is on, leading to another confrontation between the two, one that is caught on tape by some of the townspeople.
“I was not sure of what I was doing at that point,” says Phoenix. “It was early in the shoot. I was trying to figure out, who am I? What do I stand for? What’s important to me? And of course, in hindsight, that’s exactly what Joe was going through.” He credits Pascal with anchoring him and allowing him to find Joe as a character through the process. “Pedro was so clear on who Ted was,” he says. “And even though he knew what he wanted, he was so gracious in allowing me to find it. Let me tell you, I was all over the fucking map.”
Phoenix recalls one specific take of that supermarket scene that helped him finally unlock Joe as a character. “I guess subconsciously I worked myself into a state of frustration and anger and impotence,” he recalls. “And I remember it felt alive. I think it was the first time I acknowledged that people might be filming in the supermarket — and something about that just broke open the scene.”
Rehearsal for Eddington wasn’t traditional either. “We had some rehearsal days, but it’s very hard to rehearse without the set fully done, or props around you,” he says. “It’s really just about conversations.” Instead, character dynamics were built in real time, on set. “The first week was mostly just me, Luke [Grimes], and Micheal [Ward] at the sheriff’s office. Then I spent a week working with Pedro. And by the time Emma [Stone] showed up — I think in the third week — I felt like I’d already been shooting for three months.”
That made the scenes with Stone, who plays Joe’s wife Louise, feel even more charged. “We’re obviously the characters with the most history, and the most trouble between us,” says Phoenix. “And when she arrived, it already felt fraught — in the best possible way.”
Eddington marks the second chapter in Phoenix’s creative relationship with Ari Aster. After Beau Is Afraid, it’s clear the two have found something worth returning to. “We were less cordial this time,” Phoenix says, smiling. “But thank God. It really feels like a family now. Ari sees things in me before I’m even aware of them.”
“After making so many movies, you can grow bored or complacent,” says Phoenix. “You don’t always have that same natural fuel. But working with someone like Ari, who still has that pure, innocent love for film? That’s a gift. I would absolutely do anything with Ari again.”
EDDINGTON is now playing in theaters in the US.
Aspiring critic and poster designer.