How Joaquin Phoenix And Vanessa Kirby Got A Real, Unscripted Slap Into Napoleon

Ridley Scott sets are a place where movie magic happens. They're where Thelma & Louise hold hands as they face the end of the road, aliens burst from the chests of unsuspecting astronauts, and stars like Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal come together for the long-awaited sequel to a Best Picture winner like "Gladiator." On-set spontaneity has always been a great part of some of the best movies ever made, but it's also something that can cross a line. In Scott's latest project, Empire reports that two of the lead actors toed that line well by surprising the cast, crew, and one another with a spontaneous jolt of a moment — one that was secretly discussed beforehand.

Before Scott's "Gladiator" sequel finally comes to fruition in 2024, the filmmaker is set to release another historical epic. "Napoleon" stars "Beau is Afraid" actor Joaquin Phoenix as the titular French emperor, with "The Crown" star Vanessa Kirby as his wife, Joséphine Bonaparte. History shows that Joséphine and Napoleon didn't exactly find domestic bliss together, as they coupled up after her first husband was guillotined in the French Revolution. Joséphine's marriage to Napoleon was strained by her apparent affair with an army man, and it was eventually annulled when she didn't bear him any sons (per Britannica).

On screen, the pair's problems come to a peak during what Empire calls their "divorce scene," a church-set sequence in which a tearful Napoleon slaps his wife across the face. As Scott remembers it, the moment was a total surprise to everyone -– including Kirby -– but the two lead actors told the outlet that they actually had an in-depth chat about their characters a few days earlier in which they decided to do something unexpected with the scene. "She said, 'Look, whatever you feel, you can do,'" Phoenix told the outlet. "I said, 'Same thing with you.' She said, 'You can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is.'"

Their choice paid off because the feeling on set at that moment was apparently palpable. "That wasn't planned," Scott told Empire. "He just f***in' slapped her. She didn't know it was coming either. The whole room went–" Here, the magazine indicates Scott mimicked a sharp gasp. According to Kirby, the pair wanted to interject something exciting into a scene that was otherwise borrowing directly from historical records. "We were using the real words from their divorce in the church," she explained. "When that happens, you can faithfully go through an archival re-enactment of it and read out the lines and then go home. But we always wanted to surprise each other."

In an industry that's historically infamous for forcing actors to deal with unexpected traumas on set, it's refreshing to hear Kirby talk about being part of a scene where true spontaneity shone through yet consent was also present. "It's the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, 'Right, everything's safe. I'm with you. And we're gonna go to the dark places together,'" she explained. As Phoenix puts it, "We had this agreement that we were going to surprise each other and try and create moments that weren't there, because both of us wanted to avoid the cliché of the period drama," which he describes as made up of "well-orchestrated" and "designed" moments.

For Phoenix and Kirby, it all came back to the complexity of the pair's real-life relationship, which is obvious even in the driest of history books. As a widow, mother, and former mistress, Josephine was a polarizing figure in the Bonaparte family, yet she gained power in her own right through the marriage and eventually became Empress when her husband came into power. "There was something really volatile and dangerous about their interactions, but also very passionate, with moments of great warmth," Phoenix explained, adding, "One of the things that Vanessa and I talked about a lot was, How can we capture all of that within the same scene?'" Though we won't get to see the full breadth and depth of the scene until the movie hits theaters, it sounds like the sudden slap was certainly a major part of bringing what Phoenix calls the historical figures' "mercurial, strange" relationship to life.

Whether it's Leonardo DiCaprio cutting open his hand in "Django Unchained" or Dustin Hoffman shouting "I'm walkin' here!" at a driver in "Midnight Cowboy," film lovers have spent decades celebrating moments in movies that feel extra real because of unscripted on-set choices. Unfortunately, though, plenty of our most beloved movie moments have actually turned out to be crafted around painful experiences for one or more actors thanks to poor communication and violation of boundaries.

Thrillingly, though, the upcoming scene in "Napoleon" seems to be a pretty perfect example of the exact opposite of this problem. It's a moment that's both safe (for the actors) and surprising (for everyone else), anchored by two thoughtful, prepared performers. "We encouraged each other, demanded of each other, to challenge ourselves to shock each other in moments. And that's what came out of that, that moment," Phoenix told Empire.

Scott put it another way: "What could've been a boring scene suddenly had magic." You can see "Napoleon" in theaters beginning on November 22, 2023.