Adam Driver's Best Role Could Have Gone To Joaquin Phoenix

Last year, /Film ranked the 15 best Adam Driver movies, and the number one film on our list was "Annette," the musical written by the unclassifiable band Sparks and directed by "Holy Motors" helmer Leos Carax in his English-language debut. Adam Driver stars in the film as Henry McHenry, a vulgar stand-up comedian who falls in love with an opera singer and fathers a daughter who has an unusual talent, which he promptly begins to exploit for his own gain. "Annette" is a deeply eccentric film, one that certainly isn't for everyone, but Driver is fantastic in the lead role, stretching himself as a performer (his singing voice? Pretty good!) and playing a character who's easy to hate. He's brash, funny, despicable, occasionally ridiculous, and surprisingly emotional, especially in the movie's final scene, where his daughter finally confronts him about his transgressions.

But according to an interview Carax did with Indiewire around the time of the film's release, Driver wasn't actually the first actor the director had in mind for the role. That would be Joaquin Phoenix — but thanks to an unusual quirk, that particularly casting choice didn't pan out.

"I don't like to meet actors with a script. I just wanted to see if he liked the idea," Carax told Indiewire of his plan to cast Phoenix when Sparks pitched him the idea for "Annette" back in 2012. "But he was too shy to meet." An actor being too shy to meet with a director about a project almost sounds more like something that would happen in one of Carax's movies than in real life, but Phoenix has a mercurial personality, so this actually tracks with some of his previous behavior. (He came close to playing Doctor Strange for Marvel Studios, but eventually realized he wouldn't be a good fit for it.)

Without Driver, "Annette" may not have gotten made at all; the actor also served as a producer on the film, helped secure financing, and worked some magic behind the scenes to help shepherd it to the finish line. But if Phoenix were cast instead, his star power and Oscar-winning bonafides could have been similarly beneficial to the making of the movie. 

Performance-wise, it's clear Phoenix could have played a version of Henry McHenry. After all, he won his Oscar for playing a vulgar stand-up comedian in "Joker," and he has experience singing on camera in the 2005 musical "Walk the Line," in which he played country music superstar Johnny Cash. But Phoenix comes from an older generation, and there's something about Driver's comparatively youthful vigor that makes "Annette" feel more out of time, more unusual than anything else that came out in 2021. And that sense of uniqueness, the bold "are they really doing this?" quality, is what makes "Annette" really (pardon the pun) sing. So while Phoenix could have been great, Driver ended up being the perfect guy for the job.