Joaquin Phoenix let out “the most intense guttural pain scream” on the set of Beau Is Afraid to humiliate himself before a take.

During an appearance on The A24 Podcast with his director Ari Aster, the Oscar-winning actor recalled how he panicked when Aster told him he wanted to shoot the bath scene as a one-take sequence.

He admitted he was “still nervous” when he did the scene at first, so he let out an intense scream to loosen himself up for more takes.

“I didn’t really put myself out there. I was still nervous. In some way, I was controlling a little bit. I was controlling what people thought about me. I didn’t want to let people down,” he explained.

“I remember just realising I had to do something that was f**king stupid, and I just so didn’t want to do it, but I just knew. I just started screaming, just the most intense guttural pain scream that I could before we were shooting, sitting there, because I had to just fully humiliate myself. And then just go like, okay, well once that’s happened, you can’t look any more stupid than you do now.”

Phoenix added that he was “overcome with this need” to scream and “let go of everything” and wondered if his behaviour made the Midsommar director uncomfortable.

While the scream “did jar everybody” on set, Aster insisted he understood what his lead actor was doing.

“It felt to me like you were kind of trying to scream yourself out of the state you were in,” he commented. “It somehow felt like you were trying to break out of something.

“It was shocking in a way that was exciting, I think, because it did jar everybody. And I felt like it was good because the energy in the room did suddenly become both alert and disturbed.”

Beau Is Afraid opens in U.S. cinemas on Friday.

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