There are so many vegans in the world but today we are going to talk about the one who is the winner of the oscar.
Have you guessed the name?
Anyone?
And the name is
Joaquin Phoenix
Yes, the world-famous actor who played the role of Joker.
Joaquin Phoenix has been vegan since he was three years old. He has been living as a vegan since the age of three, apart from a few mistakes, like riding horses for movie roles. Which he has expressed regret about. He is also a dedicated activist who has narrated the iconic animal rights documentary Earthlings and parts of Dominion.
They were living in Venezuela at that time and decided to return to the U.S. on a cargo ship. On that ship, Joaquin and his siblings witnessed some of the crew catching and killing fish, which horrified them.

That experience led to the whole family giving up meat for good. In his own words:
“My brother and sisters and I watched these fishermen haul in hundreds of fish. They were all squirming on the deck, dying, and the guys were smacking them against the walls to kill them. We were all so disgusted because we’d been watching them jump around in the water, like minutes before. It was our first concrete experience seeing what happens to ‘food’ before it gets on the table.

“It was so violent, it was just so intense … I just had a profound strong reaction. It felt like a real injustice. It wasn’t just me, it was my siblings, all of my siblings, except for the youngest, Summer, she wasn’t born. I don’t know how to explain it, I think it made me distrustful, and angry, and frightened of humans, humanity, I just thought it was such a gross abuse of power in a way.

“I have a vivid memory of my mom’s face, which I have seen that same face maybe one other time, where she was completely speechless because we yelled at her. ‘How come you didn’t tell us that’s where meat came from?’ … We felt so betrayed. … ‘How could you not have fucking told us that?’ … I remember tears streaming down her face.… She didn’t know what to say. … And we just decided never again to eat anything that had once breathed.”

They gave up meat. And, according to the “River on the Rise” interview, Joaquin’s mother had a vegan sister who encouraged them to go further and give up all animal products and materials. But, while she played a role, it were the children who, a few months after giving up meat, convinced the parents to go all the way. River was the driving force.

Joaquin’s vegan childhood and career

All seven members of the family remained committed to veganism, and they wanted to influence others positively as well. So, when the children got into acting, which they all did at some point. They made sure not to promote any non-vegan products or products that they considered unhealthy. Joaquin, who made his acting debut when he was eight, has described it as follows:

“Well, we’re vegans. And when you first start acting, what you mostly do are commercials. And we said to our agent: ‘We’re not going to do anything for McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. We’ll do bicycles and dolls, and that’s about it.’ And our agent was like: ‘This is lunacy. First of all, it’s already impossible to break into this business and now you’re excluding 70% of what you might be able to do.’ [laughs] I guess we were either bold or stupid.”

Joaquin’s animal rights ads

As Joaquin became more successful, he began starring in animal rights ads to encourage people to give up animal products. The first ad he starred in was produced by animal rights organization PETA in 1998 when Joaquin was 24. He called on people to celebrate the holidays without eating turkeys.

In 2010, he teamed up with PETA again to make a short video. In this video, he shed light on the exotic animal skins trade.

Three years later, he starred in another PETA video to raise awareness about the suffering of fish. Fish are often overlooked, even though we kill over a trillion of them every year. The ad showed Joaquin drowning to illustrate how fish suffer when we take them out of the water.

A year after, he worked with the animal rights organization “Mercy for Animals” to present their undercover footage of cruelty inflicted on pigs by suppliers of Walmart.

In 2015, he worked with PETA again. This time to show that Chinese dog leather is sold to unsuspecting customers around the world and to ask people to stop buying leather in general.

The next year, he made another ad with PETA to inform people about the cruelty in the wool industry. In that ad, he also looked back on the time he wasn’t aware of the cruelty himself, and he mentioned that he used to wear suits made of wool without realizing it.

PETA actually made a billboard version of that ad as well. It was displayed at a busy Los Angeles intersection, and later also during the New York Fashion Week. But when PETA tried to run the ad in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. A local ad company refused to run it for fear of backlash from cattle and sheep farmers.

In 2017, Joaquin presented an undercover investigation by the animal rights organization Last Chance for Animals. Which showed the reality of animal testing.

In 2019, he teamed up with PETA again to run a billboard ad. This ad featured him with a chicken, photographed in such a way that one of the chicken’s eyes covered Joaquin’s, with the slogan “we are all animals.” The ad was displayed at Times Square.

And a year later, he released another video with PETA. This time he presented undercover footage of an egg farm and explained that labels like “cage-free” and “free-range” don’t mean that the animals are actually treated well.

Joaquin’s animal rights documentaries

Earthlings- In 2005, Joaquin narrated the documentary Earthlings. Earthlings educate viewers about the standard practices in major industries that use animals. It’s split up into five parts: pets, food, clothes, entertainment, and scientific research. The whole documentary can be seen as an argument against speciesism, which Joaquin lays out as follows at the very beginning:

“Since we all inhabit the earth, all of us are considered earthlings. There is no sexism, no racism, or speciesism in the term ‘earthling.’ It encompasses each and every one of us: warm- or cold-blooded, mammal, vertebrate or invertebrate, bird, reptile, amphibian, fish, and human alike. Humans, therefore, being not the only species on the planet, share this world with millions of other living creatures, as we all evolve here together.

Unity- In 2015, animal rights Shaun Monson directed a follow-up documentary called Unity. Unity is broader in scope. It’s a documentary about life in general, and animal rights are one of the topics it covers. The documentary has 100 different narrators, of which Joaquin is one.

Dominion – In 2018, animal rights activist Chris Delforce released a documentary called Dominion. Dominion is in many ways an updated version of Earthlings. It shows the day-to-day practices in the animal industries, covering each species individually, and it makes use of undercover as well as drone footage to tell the full story.
The documentary is narrated by Joaquin, Rooney Mara (Joaquin’s fiancée), Sadie Sink, Sia, Kat Von D, and Chris Delforce himself. We consider it the best documentary on animal rights to date and we strongly recommend you give it a watch. Apart from narrating documentaries, Joaquin has also acted as a producer.

Two of the best documentaries on the environmental and health problems caused by the animal industries are Cowspiracy and What The Health, both produced and directed by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn. Joaquin executive produced the latter.

The Animal People – In 2019, Joaquin produced The Animal People. This documentary tells the story of six young American activists who played a key role in a campaign against an animal testing company in the early 2000s and were charged with terrorism as a result, even though they had taken great care to stay within the confines of the law.

Gunda – In 2020, Joaquin executive produced the documentary Gunda. This documentary, which contains no dialogue or voice-over and is shot completely in black and white, follows a mother pig and her piglets, a handful of chickens, and a herd of cows living on unspecified farmland.

Joaquin’s the ground activist

In September 2019, he received the Toronto International Film Festival’s Tribute Actor Award. So, the afternoon before the ceremony, he visited the Be Fair Be Vegan advocacy campaign at one of Toronto’s subway stations and took the media with him.
Joaquin also engages in other forms of animal rights activism, and he has done so for years. He successfully redirected the increased media attention he got in 2019 and early 2020 to this as well.

On the first Sunday of June in 2019, he participated in the annual National Animal Rights Day march. Which has actually become an international event. Its purpose is to commemorate all the animals who are killed every year, educate the public about vegan alternatives, and celebrate the progress that’s being made on this front.
Joaquin and Rooney marched together. They wore shirts with the message “our planet, theirs too” and they both held animals who had been killed by the industries.

In February, he was in the U.K. for the BAFTA Awards. And he teamed up with the animal rights organization Animal Equality to drop a banner from the iconic Tower Bridge in London. The banner read: “Factory farming is destroying our planet. Go vegan.” In the accompanying interview, he discussed both climate change and animal exploitation.

Later that month, the day after he gave his historic Oscar speech. He had the opportunity to rescue a mother cow and her newborn calf who were already at the slaughterhouse.

Joaquin’s relationship, dogs, and child

Joaquin met his fiancée Rooney Mara in 2012 on the set of the movie Her, in which she played his ex-wife. But they didn’t start dating until 2016, shortly after they worked on the movie Mary Magdalene together. They got engaged in 2019.

Rooney is also vegan and is just as passionate about it as Joaquin. She founded the clothing and accessories brand HIRAETH. Which is completely free of animal products, for “a new generation of conscious women who value quality and design but don’t want to compromise on their ethical beliefs. As shown earlier in this article, Rooney also engages in animal rights activism.

Both Joaquin and Rooney brought a dog into the relationship. Joaquin has said that it was “a long process” to get them to co-exist, “but now they’re best friends.” Their names are Soda and Oskar, Joaquin rescued soda from euthanasia in 2006, and they’re both on plant-based diets.

In September 2020, the lovely couple announced that Rooney had given birth to their first child. They named him River, after Joaquin’s late brother. In an interview Joaquin gave shortly before River was born, he said the following about raising children vegan.

Read more: How to encourage your meat-eater friend to adopt a vegan lifestyle

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