- Joaquin Phoenix collapsed on "Beau is Afraid" while Patti LuPone was filming a "very intense" scene.
- Director Ari Aster said he was "really pissed 'cause it was a really good take," per Deadline.
Joaquin Phoenix is known for throwing himself completely into his movie roles and has delivered phenomenal performances in everything from "Gladiator" and "The Master" to his Oscar-winning turn in "Joker."
And it sounds like his upcoming role in horror-comedy "Beau is Afraid" is no different, as director Ari Aster revealed while surprising audiences at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in New York with the first public screening of the film on Saturday.
After the screening, Aster and Phoenix appeared on stage for a Q&A moderated by Emma Stone, during which the director said that in the last week of production, Phoenix passed out due to physical exhaustion.
"There was a scene that was very intense for Patti and it was a shot that was on Patti, it was not on him and all of a sudden he fell out of frame," Aster recalled, per Deadline.
"I was really pissed 'cause it was a really good take," he continued, adding that he was initially confused as to why Phoenix had ruined the scene until he realized that the 48-year-old actor had passed out.
Aster said he "knew it was bad" because Phoenix "was letting people touch him and people were tending to him and he was allowing it," but downplayed the seriousness of the incident.
The director said that "the point" of telling the story to the audience was that Phoenix had been so fully emotionally committed to the film "that he fainted in somebody else's take."
The "Hereditary" filmmaker explained: "He wasn't on camera and he was helping them, he was in it for them to the point where he collapsed."
"It's very poetic that he collapsed in somebody else's shot," Aster added.
The film, which marks Aster's third collaboration with buzzy studio A24, is set to be released in theaters across the US on April 21.
As well as Phoenix and LuPone, "Beau is Afraid" — which has a running time of 179 minutes — also stars Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Denise Ménochet, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires, and Michael Gandolfini.
In first reactions from those who attended the event, many praised Phoenix's performance as the titular Beau, who, per the film's synopsis, is "a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man" who "embarks on an epic, Kafkaesque odyssey back home."