For two years after, he didn’t work, even after admitting ‘‘I’m Still Here’’ was a stunt. There were offers, but nothing he would have considered. When he returned it was as Freddie Quell in ‘‘The Master,’’ the drunken disciple of Lancaster Dodd, an L. Ron Hubbard-esque cult leader played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Many consider this Phoenix’s greatest performance — he had lost all the weight from ‘‘I’m Still Here’’ and appears taut, almost gaunt. Perhaps his most powerful scene on film is the ‘‘processing’’ sequence, with Dodd intensely interrogating Quell about his troubled childhood, the camera staying close on Phoenix as his innocence morphs into possessed rage.

HE ADMITS HE HAS a mortgage and that he needs to work but adds that ‘‘I never did anything for money,’’ and when you look over his filmography, you realize this is probably true. When asked why he decided to play Jesus in the upcoming ‘‘Mary Magdalene,’’ a retelling of the New Testament story by the director Garth Davis, he says, ‘‘I was looking for something meaningful. I was looking for an experience. I was friends with Rooney.’’ (Rooney Mara plays Mary Magdalene in the movie. The two are now a couple.) Jesus, in the film, is ‘‘just a man’’ and playing him was ‘‘just instinct, just a gut feeling.’’

Image ON THE COVER Joaquin Phoenix is featured in T’s Sept. 10 Joaquin Phoenix is featured in T’s Sept. 10 Men’s Style issue Credit... Photograph by Craig McDean. Styled by Jason Rider

Phoenix’s life is remarkably simple compared to what people might imagine. He lives with Mara in the Hollywood Hills (he’s never been married and has no children) and is usually asleep by 9 p.m. and up at 6. When he’s not working his daily routine consists of answering emails, ‘‘chilling’’ with his dog, meditating, taking a karate class, eating lunch, reading scripts and dinner — but for most of last year he’d been on location. He watches documentaries on Netflix (and he watched the 10-hour true-crime doc ‘‘The Staircase’’ recently because Mara wanted to) but rarely watches new movies. When asked if any recent films have excited him, he thinks about it, stuck, and then answers, genuinely surprising himself: ‘‘ ‘Moana’! I thought it was beautiful.’’ (He later corrects himself and says it was actually ‘‘The Lost City of Z,’’ James Gray’s latest — Phoenix has starred in four of Gray’s seven films.)

Twelve years ago Phoenix went into rehab for alcoholism. ‘‘I really just thought of myself as a hedonist. I was an actor in L.A. I wanted to have a good time. But I wasn’t engaging with the world or myself in the way I wanted to. I was being an idiot, running around, drinking, trying to screw people, going to stupid clubs.’’ There was no intervention, Phoenix says, he just checked himself in. ‘‘I thought rehab was a place where you sat in a Jacuzzi and ate fruit salad. But when I got there they started talking about the 12 steps and I went: ‘Wait a minute, I’m still gonna smoke weed.’ ’’ He offers a startled, questioning look, and then later admits: ‘‘I think at the core of the program is a spirituality that is important to me, but . . . I am a hippie, you know.’’ Though he still drinks when he flies (the last drink he had was a month ago on a flight to ­London) he has stopped smoking marijuana. ‘‘There’s too many things I enjoy doing and I don’t want to wake up feeling hungover. It’s not a thing I fight against — it’s just the way I live my life. Some of it’s probably age.’’

Spike Jonze, who directed Phoenix in ‘‘Her,’’ has said that the actor is the most unpretentious person he has ever met, and you’re reminded of this when hanging with Phoenix — he is constantly searching, relentlessly earnest, almost childlike, the long answers circling back upon themselves — and as the conversation continues, he slowly slides down the back of the chair until he’s almost lying in it, casually unaware, occasionally reaching over to tap the ash from the cigarettes he keeps lighting into a plastic cup filled with water. Phoenix doesn’t pretend to have answers to anything, and when asked about the political divide in the country, he says, ‘‘I don’t think I’m anything other than another idiot yapping his opinion. I probably don’t know enough to say anything, I’m embarrassed to say.’’ He’s equally self-deprecating when he’s asked about having an obligation to his fans. ‘‘What fans? I have about three. And one of them is my mother.’’ But when he’s asked if he felt overly self-conscious when he was chosen to play Jesus, he says, simply, ‘‘No.’’ He looks at me, somewhat perplexed: ‘‘I thought: Finally, someone gets me.’’