Joaquin Phoenix slapped Vanessa Kirby on ‘Napoleon’ set to “surprise” her

Joaquin Phoenix has said that he slapped his Napoleon co-star Vanessa Kirby on set to “surprise” her, as part of a pact they’d made.

The actor, who portrays the titular character in Ridley Scott’s upcoming biopic about the French military commander, hits his fictional wife Joséphine de Beauharnais (Kirby) in a heated divorce scene.

Phoenix and Kirby explained to Empire that they’d agreed to shock each other whilst filming to ensure that the movie didn’t feel like a boring, overly planned biopic.

“We were using the real words from their divorce in the church,” Kirby said. “When that happens, you can faithfully go through an archival re-enactment of it and read out the lines and then go home. But we always wanted to surprise each other.”

Phoenix added, recalling their agreement before filming: “She said, ‘Look, whatever you feel, you can do.’ I said, ‘Same thing with you.’ She said, ‘You can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is’.

“We had this agreement that we were going to surprise each other and try and create moments that weren’t there, because both of us wanted to avoid the cliché of the period drama. And by that I mean moments that are well-orchestrated and designed.”

Kirby added: “It’s the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, ‘Right, everything’s safe. I’m with you. And we’re gonna go to the dark places together.’”

Phoenix said: “We encouraged each other, demanded of each other, to challenge ourselves to shock each other in moments. And that’s what came out of that, that moment.”

The actors’ revelations come as director Scott said that Phoenix “didn’t know what to do” two weeks before filming was set to begin on Napoleon.

Scott told Empire: “He’ll come in, and you’re fucking two weeks’ out, and he’ll say, ‘I don’t know what to do’. I’ll say, ‘What?!’ ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Oh God. I said, ‘Come in, sit down.’ We sat for 10 days, all day, talking scene by scene. In a sense, we rehearsed. Absolutely detail by detail.”

Napoleon is released in cinemas on November 22.

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