Best Supporting Actor 2000: Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator

Joaquin Phoenix received his first Oscar nomination for portraying Commodus in Gladiator.

Phoenix portrays Commodus as a pure evil spoiled evil emperor. This type of performance has been done many times before, any film with an evil Roman emperor has this sort of performance within it. Joaquin Phoenix does not really show anything new in his portrayal of Commodus as an evil Emperor. From his first scene we can instantly see that he is an evil, with his sweaty pale look, and his voice which really can be described as evil.

His voice he uses sound rather similar to an infamous portrayal of another evil emperor whose name also starts with C. Phoenix quite clearly seems to be imitating that actor with his performance. After all they both play evil emperors who murder their predecessors, and they both wish rather for a relationship with their sister which is far too close. Phoenix really imitates this earlier performance, and really I should not even say imitates but rather really rips off the earlier performance. He has the same evil voice, self-indulgent manner of movements.

Phoenix I suppose is creepy but any actor could be creepy quite easily since the character himself is simply just that. He really does nothing more with his character than one would expect. Phoenix sort of attempts to bring more to Commodus but it is mostly fairly random. Some of the time he makes him a man desperate for support of some kind, but this is often thrown off by a weird gesture just to be a strange villain. Phoenix is an actor with a unique presence so this is not a complete failure of a performance, but a better performance could easily have come out of this character even with this actor.