Mark Ruffalo says Joaquin Phoenix was a pretty great roommate
The Poor Things actor also took a minute to shout out Woody Harrelson and his homemade hot sauce in his recent Hot Ones appearance
There’s something so charming about the idea of hugely famous actors being regular old roommates. Do they have to make a chore chart? Do they share groceries? Squabble over dishes? Do they ever send each other passive aggressive texts to turn down the goddamn music because they’re on an important Zoom call with Christopher Nolan or David Fincher or some other stratospherically famous Hollywood person?
Not so for Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix, who shared a home while shooting 2007's Reservation Road, apparently. “[Joaquin] was a great roommate,” Ruffalo said during his recent appearance on Hot Ones. “He was the roommate who’d be out and you’d get a text: ‘Need anything? Do you need me to pick up anything?’”
Ruffalo also revealed that it was Phoenix who offered him the room in the first place. (He was initially supposed to stay somewhere else.) We’re guessing the request was more for the pleasure of Ruffalo’s company than any pressing concern about splitting the rent, but—as was made abundantly clear this summer—actors’ lives (and paychecks) aren’t always as glamorous as one might think. They still have to do dishes, for example; or, at least, Phoenix did. “The place is clean. All the dishes were washed,” Ruffalo continued, adding that the Napoleon star has “a great sense of humor” and was “super thoughtful.” Phoenix is also apparently a “great cook” who turned Ruffalo onto vegan cuisine, something it seemed like he was really wishing for after his fifth hot wing or so.
Phoenix isn’t the only one of Ruffalo’s famous friends to take him on a culinary adventure. Apparently, Woody Harrelson carries a vial of homemade hot sauce generated from a breed of pepper he grows himself “everywhere he goes.” “It’s literally a matchstick amount of that in a freaking giant pot of chili, and it’s just ‘bang.’ It’s so intense,” Ruffalo said, laughing. Especially in light of this, we have to second host Sean Evans’ motion to get Harrelson on the show as quickly as possible.