It wasn’t long after Joaquin Phoenix’s parents fled a cult that the entire family became vegan.
You read that right. In a new Vanity Fair cover story, Phoenix explains how he—and his entire family—first became vegan back in 1977. It happened when they were onboard a Miami-bound cargo ship from Venezuela, where they were getting away from their lives as members of the religious cult known as the Children of God (the story says that the family was far from the orbit of the things that made the cult infamous).
As the story describes, the children—Joaquin, along with siblings River, Rain, and Liberty—saw fishermen taking catches from their rods, and throwing them against nails pounded into the vessel’s wall. They had eaten fish before, and knew what it was, but they had no idea where fish came from, or how they were captured.
“It was so violent, it was just so intense,” Phoenix said about the memory. “I have a vivid memory of my mom’s face, which—I have seen that same face maybe one other time, where she was completely speechless because we yelled at her. How come you didn’t tell us that’s what fish was? I remember tears streaming down her face… She didn’t know what to say.”
Within two months, the entire family (then named Bottom, now named Phoenix) moved to Florida and had taken up veganism. Phoenix remains a vegan to this day.
Phoenix is gearing up for his new movie, Joker, to finally be released to wide audiences. In creating a backstory for Batman’s iconic arch-nemesis, the movie has painted him with a background that many have compared to the ‘involuntary celibates,’ or ‘incels,’ who have been involved with significant real-life violence in the last several years. The movie has already debuted at TIFF and the Venice Film Festival to both wide praise and wide controversy. Much of the Vanity Fair profile sees Phoenix, as well as Joker director Todd Phillips responding to that controversy.
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