James McAvoy says Joaquin Phoenix "ditched" M. Night Shyamalan movie Split last minute
By Dan Selcke
Last month, actor Joaquin Phoenix made waves after he dropped out of a new film from Carol director Todd Haynes mere days before the film was supposed to start. The movie is reportedly a gay romance, and there was speculation that Phoenix may have gotten cold feet about the subject matter. But it's starting to sound like he just has an issue with dropping out of movies at the last minute in general.
This comes from Phoenix's fellow actor James McAvoy, who's currently out there promoting his new movie Speak No Evil. During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McAvoy said that Phoenix also dropped out of M. Night Shyamalan's 2016 horror movie Split right before shooting was set to begin: “I think he ditched it like two weeks before they started shooting. It was really last minute.”
McAvoy was called in to play the lead character in Split: a serial killer with multiple personalities. He did a great job, which is all the more impressive considering that he had to get everything together very quickly. Split is generally regarded as the movie that revitalized Shyamalan's career after a string of iffy projects, and it didn't hurt McAvoy's prospects either. He would return as that character in the (less well-regarded) sequel Glass in 2019.
McAvoy is full of praise for Phoenix as an actor, by the way, lest this be taken as pure shade; he's just relaying what he knows. It does add another wrinkle in the ever-evolving story of Phoenix being something of a difficult actor to work with on set. In addition to these hasty exits, we've also heard that he demanded a lot of last-minute rewrites on the set of his upcoming movie Joker: Folie à Deux.
But hey, Phoenix won an Oscar for playing the Joker the first time around, so maybe his methods work for him, even if they sound like a bit of a pain to put up with. The Joker sequel hits theaters on October 4.
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