One has the very distinct feeling Joaquin Phoenix would rather be doing anything but another press junket. Swaggering into interview, dressed in head-to-toe black and fumbling desperately to light a cigarette, Phoenix looks exhausted, virtually pretending to be drunk, before reluctantly sitting down to face the typical barrage of questions. He makes no bones about how 'over it' he is and admits we journalists don't get off lightly. "I know you guys have it rough. All I do is come in for three days and then I piss off."

Phoenix is referring to the fleeting few days he's spent at the Toronto Film Festival where our interview takes place. This is his umpteenth one-on-one for the day so he has good reason to be feeling rather out of sorts.

"I don't mind doing print interviews," he admits. "What I really hate doing is TV — twelve interviews in an hour pretending to be oh-so-fresh, which I'm clearly not, as you can see," the actors says half-smiUngly.

The reason 26-year-old Phoenix is talking to me again, is because of a nifty little film noir he's starring in called The Yards. In it, he and Mark Wahtberg play two young guns who get caught up in a socio-political scandal involving the mob and the New York transit system. The periods may be different, but the traits of his latest character are not too distant from those of his classic role in Gladiator [he played Emperor Commodus opposite Russell Crowe's General Maximus], in both films, Phoenix's roles gravitate to the dark side, whether he likes the definition or not.

"I hate it when people put that label, on a film, that it's dark. I don't know what that means. What people call dark, to me actually makes it more interesting. I think the characters are really complex and ambiguous in The Yards. I don't think that, for James (Gray, director), things are black and white; good and evil; dark and light. I think that his films are all these things. The world is complex. Other people might see black and white, but I see a tot of colours. I've tried to find all parts of the person that I'm playing in my films, and to understand what Leads them to the place where we find them in the film."

Interestingly, for The Yards, Phoenix was originally offered Mark Wahlberg's more heroic character to play, but felt the role he ultimately chose was the more challenging of the two.

"I was involved with the film for at least two years prior to shooting, when Inventing The Abbotts and To Die For had only just been released. When I first read the script, I thought the Leo [Wahlberg's] character would be too easy for me. I knew exactly what the notes were, whereas the other character's arc I thought was amazing. The reason being is that he's not as straightforward as he seems. It seems like he's on top of the world and that he has everything, but it's all a facade, and trying to play that was far more interesting for me." The young protagonists in The Yards are scheming, upwardly-mobile 

types who initially stand out of the Gen-X crowd, but who ultimately get bogged down with more troubles than any Gen-X-er around them is experiencing. Phoenix explains:

"It's clear in the film that there is no familial support, without it being shoved down your throat Like you might find in flashbacks in other films. These guys are part of a really misguided generation: a generation with divorced parents, and one that doesn't have support from their parents. [Hence] the characters create their own moral code and make serious errors in judgment."

It's all quite the antithesis to Phoenix's real life. Although his now-famous parents are divorced, the actor grew up in a warm, loving, hippy household with four siblings. He is still extremely close to his family.

Joaquin, who used to go by the name Leaf, is the Phoenix middle child. His brother River, who died of a drug overdose in 1993, would have been 30 this year. His sister Rain is 27, Liberty is 23 and Summer is 22. Their parents, John Bottom and Arlyn Dunetz, changed their legal surname to Phoenix and raised a family of actors and mostly chainsmoking vegans. Life is full of contradictions.

Staying true to his revised surname. Joaquin has made a career out of a couple of successful first films, then disappeared for a few years, only to rise out of the ashes to greater glory. For a long time, the actor worked in the shadow of River. After River's tragic death, Leaf abandoned his career for two years, then dropped the greenie-sounding moniker and made a comeback in 1995's To Die For, as Nicole Kidman's weather mistress's under-age fling. Directed by Gus Van Sant [who ironically directed River in his first and last big movies: My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, respectively], To Die For was the flick that kicked off a long line of noir roles for Joaquin.

"When I turned 18, I just became interested in the work again," he tells. "I guess I'd grown as an individual and as a human, and I felt that there were things I wanted to express."

Getting back on the audition trail wasn't difficult, as countless directors had been begging to have him play prime roles in their films, and, "for the sake of getting my chops back and getting into the groove of auditioning again" Joaquin attended plenty of casting calls.

"Auditioning is a whole different style of acting," he says. "I'd go in and read for stuff like Lassie Comes Home — all these dog and whale movies."

For a while, it seemed as though the hippy-esque Leaf image was coming back to haunt him. "I thought, 'god. this is going nowhere'. Then I read To Die For and loved it."

Joaquin Phoenix is a nomad in the sincerest sense of the word. He has no fixed abode ("I'm looking for somewhere, so if you know of something, let me know"). And these days he's not even sure which country to call home ("I was living in New York, then Gladiator came up, and I was living in Europe"]. He did at one stage live with Liv Tyler for three years, and gives more than the hint that he wouldn't mind settling like that again some day soon. "I seem to wander around without any real residence, but the truth is

that I want a steady relationship and a home and all that. It just hasn't happened yet," he sighs with slight reluctance.

Joaquin goes on to talk about being a vegetarian ("I have been since age seven"), saying that although vegan food has improved over the past few years, some of the stricter vegan ethos has caused hiccups in his entertainment career. One example was when doing a modelling gig for Prada where he had to reject wearing the label's leather goods.

"I did the Prada campaign, but the stylist wore the shoes," he insists. "They did a separate shot of the shoes and it wasn't me wearing them."

Young Joaquin may be homeless at the moment, but the work is still coming in thick and fast. We'll next see him starring opposite Kate Winslet in the sexual drama Quills, which features the pair in "the toughest and most unusual sex scene I've ever done", reveals the boy who's probably already done too much. Paul Fischer