Oscars 2020: Joaquin Phoenix Talent Analysis

I’ve been thinking to write a post about Joaquin Phoenix for a long time, but now that he won the Oscar, I have no excuse 🙂

Joaquin is a fascinating person with character depth and incredible ability to perform various emotions in front of the camera. He also has a somewhat troubled personality, often suffering from emotional instability, which forced him several times to take a break from his acting career.

He is born as a Yang Water Master Element with a rather excessive amount of Wood Element, which represents Output Component, mainly in the form of The Artist Talent. We analyzed hundreds of actors until now, and he has one of the strongest Artist Talents of all.

Such setup tells us that his main driving force and natural talent is creativity and performance. The problem with such charts, where the main driving force is so dominant, is that it brings instability, either physical or emotional. People with strong Artist Talent often have restless minds, which can drive them crazy, but also give a tough time to people around them as well. Excessive Artist Talent can present itself as a constant need to create, perform, and materialize ideas. At the same time, they are perfectionists, so if things are not going well, they might throw a tantrum and torture everybody around to get things right.

He is known for being difficult on the set, but it seems lately he is becoming more aware of that issue, he even addressed it in his Oscar acceptance speech.

What is also problematic in his case is the general weakness of his Yang Water Master Element. The Wood Element is taking a lot of power, which means that the creative process can be rather exhausting for him; therefore, he needs to take a break from time to time. It’s an interesting fact that his most significant success, the Oscar which he got for his Joker role, came during the Water years (2019 Pig and 2020 Rat). His creativity depends on his ability to maintain power to feed the demanding Wood Element, that’s why Water is quite essential for him.

So, as we can see, with great talent comes also significant issues. This is often a case with highly capable and talented people, they usually pay the price in health and mental instability, and if they don’t take care of it, they can burn out rather quickly. Joaquin Phoenix was several times on the edge of burnout, but he managed to come back stronger and better, so we are looking forward to his future work.


Also published on Medium.