I don’t know where it comes from, but Joaquin Phoenix has it. Phoenix, with his original, hushed sensitivity and hallmark attention to a quiet, delicate humanity in all of his performances, isn’t the obvious choice for the very physical lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film about the heroism of the everyday firefighter.

But then his new film, Ladder 49, isn’t content to just deliver pyrotechnic thrills. It’s a surprisingly touching and subtle portrait of marital strength and commitment in the face of a career that undermines such a union in the most admirably frightening ways. Phoenix and his co-star Jacinda Barrett create a wholly believable and touching young couple surrounded by the daily threat of death in the line of duty. They share a decade together in the film, and manage to ignite more sparks together in their onscreen chemistry than the film’s special effects gurus manage in Ladder 49’s many thrilling set-pieces. That’s a considerable achievement.

Today Phoenix professes to be tired after an early morning Oprah show taping, but he couldn’t look more laid-back cool. In stylish jeans and a fashionably wrinkled white button-down shirt casually buttoned down, he is thinner and more chiseled than Jack Morrison, his beefy, Ladder 49 counterpart. He’s standing by the window, the smell of a day’s worth of cigarette smoke enveloping the room as if we’d just stepped onto the film set itself. I like him already.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic: Let’s talk about the love story aspect of Ladder 49. I was surprised by the tenderness in the film between you and Jacinda Barrett, who plays your wife. It’s not the most visible part of the story from the marketing push the film is getting, but it is the heart and soul of this movie and what makes it really fly.

Joaquin Phoenix: Yes. It was something that was really important to me from the beginning. I certainly didn’t want to just make an action film. And I didn’t want to make a Hollywood movie. And it’s something that is a real part of these men and women’s lives, and their families—that balance that they have to try and find between their professional lives and their personal lives, and how difficult it is to talk about the job with their families. All these guys: ‘Do you talk to your wife and kids about your job?’ ‘Nah, nah, I can’t. They’re just going to worry and cry. I’ve got enough to worry about. I don’t want to worry about them worrying about me.’ And it’s something that hasn’t really been explored in a firefighting movie, and something important I felt; authentic and real. And Jacinda is just f***ing amazing. I think she had the toughest job out of anyone. Her part was the most underwritten, and she did a lot of research that really helped in forming the character.

LS: The film seems very true to life in terms of its ability to so effectively etch out the struggles to balance a family and career—in this case an obviously extreme situation. It’s very honest and feels like there’s truth there, and it doesn’t look away from the hard stuff.

JP: I felt like that’s what we were all after and trying to achieve. I think initially this character of Jack was kind of the perfect character—he was the Hollywood hero. He was the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect firefighter. One of my concerns from the beginning is that I just didn’t feel that reflected reality, and I wanted it to be more raw. Who I looked to for that sense of reality were the firefighters that we were working with all the time, and I felt a great obligation to be true to their story.

When you start working and you’ve researched a character, and you start creating the world and the boundaries, you just start having a sense when something isn’t true. You just start feeling that ‘I’m acting. I know this isn’t genuine.’ The guys that always bailed us out were the firefighters. We’d call our technical advisor at one in the morning to ask about something: ‘What would really happen…? How much do you earn? What would be the difference in pay?’ I really felt like it was something that we all were in pursuit of truth throughout the course of this film.

LS: You went through a significant training period for this film, which paid off in the realism of the fire scenes. What exactly did you do? You obviously bulked up for the role.

JP: I just worked out. It’s something I never do. I trained, lifted weights and the three and a half weeks I was at the academy, you do your physical training. You jog, sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks and all that shit. So I did that, but really started lifting hard for six weeks leading up to shooting. I knew that it was going to be physically exhausting. I knew that I couldn’t afford to get hurt. I knew that my body had to be in good shape just to handle that. I knew that I wanted to do a lot of the work and I didn’t want a stunt man coming in and doing it for me, even if the camera was behind me. I knew that after multiple takes I would grow tired, inevitably. So I just trained.

LS: Were you actually physically frightened when you did these scenes? When you first read the script did you say, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ I guess if you’re acting convincingly, it’s true in the moment, psychologically in peril in those scenes?

JP: Initially when I read the script, I didn’t know how we were going to do the effects; what the environment was going to be like. So I didn’t really know what to expect. To be honest, after I’d gone on real runs and been in real fires, anything that was on set just paled in comparison and I never felt in danger at all. In fact, there were a few times when I was pushing to go deeper into a room and closer because I knew when to feel the heat on my ears, and I knew when it was too hot for me and when it wasn’t. And I felt a real confidence in the training that I had and the equipment that I had.

John and me were in one of those first fires and we got in there really deep and they were on our backs, and the cameraman bailed. He pulled out because it got so hot he couldn’t take it. And me and John were still in there, hitting the fire with the hose, going around, and the effects guys had to come in tell us to cut, because we were just in that room. Now when I think about it, some of the stuff I think about, I go, ‘You were f***ing mad!’ But at the time it felt so comfortable. I had just done so much work that I felt really at ease.

Compared to what I experienced in the field, (shooting) it was nothing and often times I was trying to find that sense of adrenaline rush that I felt when I had gone into fires and how to recreate that. That was probably the most difficult thing after I felt really comfortable shooting the scenes when I was a rookie, and I was meant to be thrown, because I was thrilled to go into it. It’s a weird thing that happens. You actually want fire. As a firefighter, you’re dying to get some action. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just a feeling of empowerment when you’ve actually knocked this thing down that’s so unpredictable. And I loved that feeling, and actually I miss it.

LS: Across the course of your career, you suggest a sort of inner sort of life than has a defined intensity. To me, you’re always questioning. There’s a real suggestion of a psychological, human that is not present in a lot of your contemporaries. I thought it was interesting to see you in this particular film because it initially looks like a traditional action hero role. Can you discuss how you found your way into this role since you’re not the first person we’d think of when we imagine an action actor? You seem an odd choice for this role though it ends up very effective.

JP: Yeah, I’m sure I wasn’t the first choice for this. But I’ve always tried to create characters that, to me, were complex and interesting and reflected what I saw around me. And so even if it’s to play a villainous character, like going in and playing the character (in) Gladiator, I didn’t go in and approach that as, ‘I am a malevolent emperor.’ I tried to really understand his experience. And with this I didn’t go into it thinking that ‘I’m a heroic firefighter.’ I always want to discover the man beneath it all. In those scenes with Jacinda were changes that we made once we started doing the research. We thought these characters (have) a sense of heroism that’s inherent in their jobs.

And with that in mind, it seems that we’re able to explore maybe some more unsavory aspects of their personalities. Maybe we’re able to see a guy not being loving with his wife, and not talking to her and answering all of her questions, but being uncomfortable and being tense and ‘dark,’ as the studios would call it. I felt like there was that opportunity, and how I found a way was it was the research that informed me, and spending time with these guys, watching how they interacted with their families and with their wives and just talking to them and them telling us how difficult it is to share your experiences on the job with your family back at home.

LS: From an actor’s point of view, is there an approach difference between playing a fictional character like this versus playing Johnny Cash in the upcoming Walk the Line?

JP: Johnny Cash is about as interesting and complex a character as you can get. There’s nothing you really have to do with that one. But I don’t know that you can do- depends on how the person is. I mean obviously you’re playing a real life character. You’re going to base it on them and you’re not going to try to add or subtract too much. And usually when we make films about real characters, they are usually more complex. For some reason the expectation is for them not to be your typical heroes. I don’t think that’s as much of an issue when you’re playing a real-life character. An historical character is far more complex than a character a writer has just conjured up in his head. Usually, for whatever reason, writers and studios idealize every character, for some reason, and I don’t think that’s the case when you’re playing an historical character.

LS: When you strip away everything else and think just about acting, in the moment, what exactly is it that you feel when it’s happening? What makes it so satisfying?

JP: I don’t know how to explain it without just being abstract. It just goes back to my earliest jobs that I did, and just moments where I achieved feeling a genuine emotion and this feeling of my body being alive in a way that I had never felt before. It’s kind of like, I assume, when an athlete will talk about being in ‘the zone,’ this place where they can’t do anything wrong. You’re suddenly aware of every cell in your body, and you feel that you can do anything almost. You feel that you have completely harnessed yourself; that you’re in control in some way. Nothing else has ever given me that feeling. And it’s rare. It’s once every few movies. But the feeling is so great that you keep going back and you will endure whatever misery comes from working for that feeling of whatever it is.

LS: When you get to those moments, can you put a finger on what has to be aligned to get you there? Or does it just happen in the moment?

JP: I don’t think that you can just create it. There’s not a set of steps that you can follow to create it. It’s certainly that you need the other actor to also be focused and be in the moment, and the right feeling on set. If everyone is looking at the scene wondering when lunch is, you’re probably not going to find it. There’s a whole bunch of mysterious elements that have to come together and I couldn’t really say what they are.

LS: Would you say there’s any type of methodology or ‘through-line’ that connects your work or the way you pick projects?

JP: Yeah, I don’t really think there is - honestly, I just have a feeling again that I can’t… I talk to my agent (who says), ‘What do you want to do next?’ I go, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m looking for something specific, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. The reason why I’m saying no to this is because it doesn’t fulfill my need.’ I don’t know exactly what it is. I know with Ladder 49 I had this - one thing I told my agent was, ‘I think I’d like to be a father next. I want to have an experience with a family. I want to explore a character that has a family.’ And Ladder 49 showed up a couple weeks later. And I read it and thought, ‘That definitely takes care of that.’ But I couldn’t say, ‘I want to be a lawyer next.’

LS: Do you sometimes read a script and a particular scene comes up and you say to yourself, ‘I’d really like to say that,’ or ‘I’d really like to do this particular thing…?’

JP: Sure. I always find there’s always three scenes that pop out to me that really are the seed for wanting to play the part, to explore more. And I totally forgot what I was saying!

LS: Are there sometimes movies you see that your contemporaries are in, and you say, ‘Wow. I really would like to have played that.’ Can you think of any examples of something maybe that you passed on, and somebody else took to a level that made you wish you hadn’t?

JP: Not really. I remember I got this script years and years ago for this movie, and I read it and saw that it had some merits. But nothing that I really wanted to explore. I thought it had the potential to be a good movie but I didn’t want to explore it. And it came back and (they said), ‘Are you sure? Because Ed Norton really wants to do this movie, and he’s going to do it if you don’t.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not going to change my mind just because someone else might do it. It’s not right for me. And if this actor feels passionately about it, there’s something that he sees that’s right for him that he needs to explore.’ And that was American History X, in which he went on and got nominated for it and did all this amazing work. And I wouldn’t have had that same experience, had I done it. I just knew that it wasn’t what I wanted to experience, and he desperately wanted to.

LS: You keep talking about—this is interesting—the ‘experience’ of doing the roles. More than just the job of acting, for you it’s taking yourself through the experience and what you might learn about yourself rather than just giving a performance.

JP: I don’t even know if it’s what you’re going to learn about yourself. Even if it’s learning about our world through this character’s perspective, it is, for me all there is—the process—because the end result is something that I have no control over, and there are so many factors. If the movie is good- it’s subjective as well. There are a couple things you look at—either the box office, which I can’t be lying, but I don’t give (a) s**t, and it’s how people respond, and that’s totally subjective, so I can’t really give (a) s**t. So the only thing I can count on that means anything to me is the process.