#Rain phoenix prison movie movie

Of the four child actors in the movie, only two – Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell – got to adulthood unscathed.

#Rain phoenix prison movie movie

And when I watch the movie now, when he disappears at the end, it’s just very, very sad,” says Reiner. He never told me what he thought about – I assumed maybe one of his parents, but I don’t know. The next take, in which he’s crying, is the one that’s in the movie. “I said to him: ‘I want you to think about a time when someone, an adult who is important to you, let you down.’ He nodded and went away to think for a few minutes. Yet as talented as he was, Reiner had to coax the then 15-year-old to show his pain instead of bottling it inside. He could play instruments, he was so bright and brilliant, he could do anything, really,” says Rob Reiner, who directed Phoenix in Stand By Me. “When River came in to audition, it was obvious that he was just an amazing, amazing talent. I knew his father had problems with alcohol or something, I knew there were problems there Every young actor, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Timothée Chalamet, who shows early promise gets compared to Phoenix. Unlike most stars who die young, Phoenix isn’t just associated with early death but also precocious talent. There’s a beauty in that – the man with the cause, the leader – but there’s also a deep loneliness.”

When he wasn’t a movie star, he was a missionary. He often said he wished he could just be anonymous. After he died, his mother Arlyn (known as Heart) told Esquire magazine that her son shared that sentiment: “As River grew, he did become more and more uncomfortable being the poster boy for all good things. “I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me,” he sobbed in his breakout performance in Stand By Me. But reacting against success can be as risky as embracing it, because it can elide into self-loathing and confusion.Ĭomforting Wil Wheaton in his breakout performance in Stand By Me, 1986. He was never entranced by the glitz of his own celebrity when he was nominated for an Oscar in 1989, for his performance in Running on Empty, a journalist on the Oscars red carpet said to him: “It’s easy to get caught up in the Hollywood hoopla, isn’t it?” “Mmm, not for me, it isn’t,” he replied, looking a little surprised by the question. This was the boy who once ran out of a restaurant in tears because his girlfriend, the actor and activist Martha Plimpton, ordered seafood. It is a template many have tried to copy, but none succeeded like Phoenix, because he believed in his ideals more intensely than most people believe in anything. Phoenix had always hated fame but considered its one potential benefit was that he could use it for good and change the world, talking urgently in every interview about vegetarianism and the environment. Next week is the 25th anniversary of that night, when the young actor who had always taken care to eschew all the usual celebrity cliches died the most cliched death of all, on Sunset Boulevard at the age of just 23.