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Despite getting a $20 million payday for his work in Joker: Folie à Deux, this hasn’t been a good year for Joaquin Phoenix. The Joker sequel, which saddled with numerous script problems, was savaged by audiences and opened to disappointingly low numbers. Now, some comments made earlier this year by Succession star Brian Cox have targeted Phoenix’s work in his previous movie, Napoleon.
Director Ridley Scott cast Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte in the film, which chronicles his rise to Emperor of the French and his fall from power and eventual exile from his homeland. The movie has its admirers, but Cox is not one of them.
“It’s terrible,” said Cox at a HistFest panel at the British Library via IndieWire. “A truly terrible performance by Joaquin Phoenix. It really is appalling. I don’t know what he was thinking. I think it’s totally his fault and I don’t think Ridley Scott helps him. I would have played it a lot better than Joaquin Phoenix, I tell you that. You can say it’s good drama. No — it’s lies. … It’s a sort of wacky performance.”
Cox also took the opportunity to bash Mel Gibson’s Braveheart for its lack of historical fidelity.
“Braveheart is a load of nonsense,” added Cox, who had a role in that film as Argyle Wallace. “Mel Gibson was wonderful, but it’s a load of lies. He never impregnated the French princess. It is bollocks, that film.”
Ironically, Scott has another movie coming out later this year, Gladiator 2, which takes even greater liberties with history than Napoleon did. And no matter how well Gladiator 2 turns out to be, it would be awesome if Cox shared his review for that movie as well.
