Joaquin Phoenix was forced to call in sick to the Cannes Film Festival.

The actor, 33, missed the Monday premiere of his movie Two Lovers after doctors told him he couldn’t fly because of his illness.

“Joaquin has the stomach flu,” his rep, Susan Patricola, tells PEOPLE. “He had his dog boarded, his tux in hand but couldn’t even sit on the plane. He did go to the hospital to get hydrated, hoping he could get on the plane but he didn’t stay there. He was so sick – and so sorry he couldn’t be there with everyone.”

Phoenix was due to promote his drama Two Lovers at the festival. The film’s director, James Gray, told reporters Monday that Phoenix wanted to make the trip to France, but he advised him to go to the doctor.

“He wanted to come,” Gray told reporters. “I said ‘No, go to the doctor and see what he says.’ Sadly he followed my advice and they put him in the hospital.”

Gray praised Phoenix’s performance, calling him “fantastic” opposite Gwyneth Paltrow.

Source, WENN

Actor Joaquin Phoenix, who played Johnny Cash on the big screen, is cutting an album with Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess, Billboard.com has learned. But whether the set will be released remains unclear.

According to U.K.-born Burgess, who has lived in Los Angeles for several years, the album came about after Phoenix learned to play guitar in preparation for his role in the 2005 film “Walk the Line,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

“Once he learned guitar, he found that he had quite a lot of demons inside himself that he wanted to expel through music,” says Burgess, who has been mixing the record alongside Alan McGee, the Charlatans’ manager and former head of U.K. independent label Creation Records.

But it seems that the perfectionism that has brought Phoenix acclaim as an actor could prevent the record from ever seeing the light of day.

“All the tracks that me and Alan worked with him on were brilliant,” says Burgess. “But I think he just keeps scrapping everything or redoing everything. I’m sad to say that I think it’s one of those records that may never come out, to be honest with you.”

“It’s an ongoing thing,” he continues. “I’m trying to get Alan to force him to put it out at the moment, but I don’t know whether it will (get released).”

Source

WENN

Here’s Joaquin Phoenix on the cover of Nylon magazine’s winter 2008 issue. He’s sexy, what do you think?

Since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, filmmaker James Gray has been sparse with output. It took six years for him to deliver his follow-up, The Yards, and another seven years to give us We Own the Night, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes and opens in theaters on October 12. However, there won’t be such a long wait for Gray’s fourth film; titled Two Lovers, the film begins shooting in November with Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. Two Lovers marks a third collaboration with Phoenix, who starred in both The Yards and We Own the Night. If there’s a part somewhere for Mark Wahlberg, it could be a perfect reunion.

According to Variety, Two Lovers will star Phoenix as a Brooklyn man torn between two women. There’s the family friend who his parents are trying to set him up with, and then there’s the beautiful new neighbor who he prefers and with whom he falls in love. I’m going to go ahead and guess that Paltrow is being cast as the neighbor.

Source

Joaquin Phoenix has considered making pornographic movies based on his own films. The Oscar-nominated actor already has some perfect porn titles ready to use if his idea ever comes to fruition.

He says, “For some time, I was hoping to do porn versions of movies I’ve been in. That could have been good, like ‘Glad He Ate Her’ for Gladiator. 8MM you might want to remake as 8 Inches. I have a friend who can rattle off porn titles for every movie I’ve been in. its f**king genius.”

Actor JOAQUIN PHOENIX dreads to think what the media frenzy would be like if his older brother RIVER had died in today’s celebrity-obsessed age of fast communications.

Joaquin famously phoned the emergency services as River lay dying of a drugs overdose outside Johnny Depp’s Los Angeles nightclub The Viper Room in 1993.

And the Walk The Line actor is thankful that the news of River’s death wasn’t discussed all over the world online as it would be now.

He says, “When my brother passed it was toward the end of an era. If it had happened much later, it would have been on a lot of fucking blogs. The amount of information flying back and forth now has just gone beyond comprehension… In some ways it’s hard to swallow. It makes you feel sick about yourself and about human beings. You look at yourself and say, ‘When have I exploited others and been voyeuristic?’ The thing we should be discussing in the news, what the media should be going after in a heartless way, isn’t the family of somebody who has passed away, but instead - oh, I don’t know - how about a president who’s lying? That’s not to say my brother’s life didn’t have value, but it certainly did not deserve to be covered more than world politics and other important issues, particularly when death happens every day to millions of people all over the world and we don’t seem to give a fuck about that.”

source

Joaquin Phoenix is bristling at Eva Mendes‘ wisecrack that doing “We Own the Night” with him was “kind of like working with a puppy dog or a 2-year-old.” Phoenix rants to the December Playboy: “Had I known I was supposed to be a puppy dog, I would have been much more cute and more consistently attentive. My apologies, Eva, but I had a few other scenes that you weren’t in. This puppy dog had a lot of work to do.”

Source