Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara have reportedly welcomed their first child together—a son named after the actor's late brother, River.
Russian director Victor Kossakovsky announced the happy news on the couple's behalf during a Q&A at the 2020 Zurich Film Festival on Sunday following a screening of the documentary Gunda, which Phoenix executive produced. “He just got a baby, by the way,” the filmmaker told the audience of why Phoenix couldn't be in attendance, “a beautiful son called River, so he cannot promote it now.”
Mara and Phoenix first met on the set of the 2013 film Her before making their official red carpet debut as a couple in 2017 at the Cannes Film Festival. In Vanity Fair's November cover story, Phoenix said Mara is “the only girl I ever looked up on the internet. We were just friends, email friends. I’d never done that. Never looked a girl up online.”
During that interview, he also spoke about his eldest brother River who died in 1993 at age 23 from a drug overdose; Joaquin was by his side. As the younger Phoenix build his own acting career he was often compared to his late brother, and when doing press for his Oscar-nominated role in 2005's Walk the Line, Joaquin was repeatedly asked about his family tragedy. “Because I came out publicly as an actor at that time, I suddenly was confronted with having to talk about something that already was very public, in the public sphere,” he said, “where you’re in a five-minute interview, every five minutes and everything, at a fucking junket.”
He continued, “It felt like, ‘Well, I’m not sure this is the right place and it feels insincere to be talking about this and I can hear in your voice that you’re trying to sound like somebody who really cares and is interested, but let’s be fucking frank about what’s happening here.’ It was just much easier to go, ‘Fuck you,’ which is an easier thing for me for whatever reason, than to explain it.”
He added that his brother's death is “not some Rosebud, as in the childhood sled that unlocks the psychic secrets of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane. ‘It’s one, it’s one of the Rosebuds,’ he says, ‘but it’s not a Rosebud in the way that people think. At all.’”
Representatives for Mara and Phoenix did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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