James McAvoy says Joaquin Phoenix "ditched" Split two weeks before filming

Joaquin Phoenix is great actor. We all know Joaquin Phoenix is a great actor. He’s given some of the best film performances of the 21st century, creating wounded, beautiful people that touch or horrify the audience as appropriate. Joaquin Phoenix: Great actor. We’re just starting to wonder—mostly in the wake of the news that he bailed on Todd Haynes’ new film five days before filming began a few months ago, and now other stuff that’s trickled out since—whether, to put it delicately, he has as many “World’s Best Co-Worker” mugs as he does Oscar nominations (4) or wins (1!). Take, for instance, an anecdote that popped out of James McAvoy’s recent (very charming!) appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused, tied to his upcoming Speak No Evil, where he notes that he got cast in M. Night Shayamalan’s 2015 thriller Split just two weeks before shooting was set to start—because Phoenix had “ditched” the part.

Now, we’d previously known that Phoenix was attached, at least informally, to Shyamalan’s dissociative identity thriller at some point, before ultimately departing; it was noted when McAvoy’s casting landed in the trades. What wasn’t readily apparent at the time was that unlike some casting notices (where the deals are set in advance, but only become public knowledge once cameras are rolling), McAvoy’s arrival in the part just two weeks before shooting was scheduled to start was really two weeks: He got dropped in and started having to cook up all those characters kind of on the fly. What’s interesting is that, reading THR‘s report from the time, Phoenix sounds like he was only vaguely circling the project, which would have reunited him with his old Signs director. But McAvoy’s description makes it sound like a much more near-run thing, where Phoenix suddenly left things a little bit in the lurch: “I think he ditched it like two weeks before they started shooting. It was really last minute.” (Looking around, it’s hard to ping what Phoenix was doing around this time—he released his Woody Allen movie, Irrational Man, earlier in 2015, but didn’t show up back in theaters until 2017’s You Were Never Really Here.)

For his part, McAvoy has nothing but praise for Phoenix as an actor—and also notes that, on some level, he kind of enjoyed having to pull together the multiple characters he played in Split on short notice. But combine it with reports about Phoenix’s love of tossing out script pages in his upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux in exchange for multi-hour re-writes, and a mental image does start to inevitably form: Lots of statues on the mantle—not that many mugs in the cupboard. (Also: What the hell would Split have looked like with Joaquin Phoenix in the central role? The mind boggles.)