Joaquin Phoenix is jokingly making a public service announcement to those people buying tickets to go watch him in his latest film Beau is Afraid.
“I was told from someone in college that there was this college thread amongst friends, a challenge they were going to take mushrooms and go see this movie,” Phoenix told Fandango in an interview. “And I just wanted to make a public service announcement and say do not take mushrooms and go see this f***ing movie.”
Phoenix then joked saying, “But if you do it, film yourself. But don’t do it!”
In the same interview, the Joker star recommended watching the film in IMAX just like he did adding, “I was definitely squirming in my seat. First of all, I’m just laughing about the entire f***ing movie. There’s a couple of sequences where I’m just squirming – I mean, stuff that [Ari] did with the sound design, it was really great. It’s such a rich world, and there’s so many details to see in it. It is a hundred percent a movie that you feel. There’s so many rich, complex themes in this film, but it’s such a visceral experience to watch it. Then you leave, and when that feeling subsides, you start thinking about it.”
A24’s Beau Is Afraid revolves around “a paranoid man [who] embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother.” The film also stars Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Denise Ménochet, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires and Michael Gandolfini, among others.