“So many mistakes”: Joaquin Phoenix refuses to watch the 1995 performance that launched his career

As talented an actor as Joaquin Phoenix is, he also comes across as a very anxious man who’d rather disappear into his characters than talk about his performances, no matter how good they are. That was never more true than when it came time to discuss the movie that helped make him a star.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, as his brother, River Phoenix, was finding fame, Joaquin’s own career was taking off with bit parts in movies like SpaceCamp and Parenthood. After the latter, Phoenix disappeared from Hollywood for six years, during which time he tragically lost his sibling. But when the actor returned, he lived up to his name; it truly was like a phoenix rising from the ashes of his past.

At the age of 21, in 1995, Phoenix was cast as Jimmy Emmett in To Die For. Backed by Columbia Pictures, To Die For is no little movie filled with no-names. Directed by Gus Van Sant, who four years earlier had worked with River in My Own Private Idaho, the film also stars Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, and Casey Affleck, with a now-legal-drinking-age Phoenix as an integral supporting character.

In To Die For, Emmett has much more than drinking on his mind. He’s a teenager obsessed with Kidman’s Suzanne Stone, the sexy TV meteorologist. Stone is obsessed with attention, and she knows just how to use Emmett to get what she wants, even when it involves murder.

Phoenix carries the film with his pained face, the emotions always so easy to read. Although he doesn’t say much, his character’s lust makes him act with a foolish intensity that will ultimately be his undoing. Despite To Die For being a critical success and earning him rave reviews, the actor whose career took off afterwards doesn’t look back fondly on the part that changed everything.

During a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times, three years after his breakthrough performance, Phoenix couldn’t look back on the role without exuding that now-famous anxiety. “I can’t even sit and enjoy it and think about it objectively. I just make so many mistakes. There’s so many things I should have done that I didn’t do.”

It’s an uncomfortable humility that hasn’t left Phoenix since, even as he has moved from celebrated supporting actor to Oscar-winning leading man. That’s part of the reason why he’s so great in To Die For as a confused kid still trying to figure out who he is under all of his emerging layers.

In To Die For, uncertainty has deadly consequences there is no coming back from. For Phoenix, that same uncertainty, mixed with the need to do things his own way, has made him a chameleon of an actor who can disappear behind any role, whether it be as the iconic Johnny Cash in Walk the Line or a sympathetic yet terrifying reimagining of the Joker.

For his breakout role, Phoenix played a young man who desired a woman who used him. In his acting career, what drives him is the need to perform, with his energy aimed at an audience who appreciates what he gives. Three decades later, the actor is still one of the most fascinating and unique actors in the business, and it all started with To Die For.