Joaquin Phoenix Uses His Win for Best Actor at the Oscars to Send a Poignant, Urgent Message

Joaquin Phoenixearned every second of that standing ovation tonight—although there wasn’t much time left over for applause once he was done speaking.

As expected, he won his first Oscar on Sunday night, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for his haunting turn as a mentally unraveling forgotten soul on a bloody journey to becoming one of the all-time comic book supervillains in Todd Phillips‘ Joker, which earned 11 Oscar nominations and more than $1 billion at the box office worldwide.

And Phoenix used his allotted time onstage, and then some, to make a plea in favor of our common humanity.

“I’m full of so much gratitude right now and I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees, or anyone in this room,” he began, “because we share the same love, the love of film, and this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know what I’d be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it’s given me, and many of us in this room, is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively, and I think at times we feel, or are made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality.”

While there’s a handful of actors who have been nominated for Oscars for their portrayals of the same character, he and Heath Ledger become only the second pair to win—and the first to do so in films not made in conjunction with each other. The only other duo to do it were Best Actor winner Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone in The Godfather and Best Supporting Actor winner Robert De Niro, who played Vito Corleone as a younger man, for The Godfather: Part II, both 

“Really, I’m standing here on the shoulders of my favorite actor, Heath Ledger,” Phoenix said at the SAG Awards last month in paying tribute to his late predecessor, who died in January 2008, seven months before The Dark Knight came out and the accolades started pouring in.

This was Phoenix’s fourth nomination, having previously been up for his supporting role as the “terribly vexed” Commodus in 2000’s Gladiator and best actor for his portrayal of Johnny Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line, for which he did his own singing, and again for his turn as a World War II vet who falls under the sway of the genteel leader of a “religious movement” in 2012’s The Master.

But it was playing the ultimate tragic clown that finally put Phoenix on top, all season long. In addition to the SAG and Academy Awards, he won the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice and BAFTA Awards.

“It’s an exciting time,” the veteran star, who’s been acting since he was a child, said on The Empire Film Podcast before Joker—the most hyped fall release after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and becoming ragingly controversial even though most people hadn’t even seen it yet—hit theaters. “It’s not familiar territory for me. I’m very comfortable making movies that [have] a limited audience and I’ve been very fortunate to continue to have the opportunity to make movies, even though the movies that I’ve made don’t have quite so much of an impact.”

Not true, but we’ll let the man have his humble fantasy.

The competition Phoenix topped this year included Leonardo DiCaprio for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory, Jonathan Pryce for The Two Popes and Adam Driver for Marriage Story.