Joaquin Phoenix sparks marriage rumors after calling Rooney Mara his ‘wife’

Phoenix and Mara quietly got engaged in 2019

Joaquin Phoenix may have just revealed that he and his longtime partner, Rooney Mara, are married.

During an episode of theTalk Easy with Sam Fragoso podcast, which aired on September 29, Phoenix reflected on his emotional Oscars speech in 2020 when he accepted the Best Actor award for his role in Joker. He shared that while he didn’t have “a fixed idea” of what he’d say during his speech, he said that it was inspired by his spouse, seemingly referring to Mara.

“I was talking with my mom and my wife, and we were just like talking s***philosophizing,” he recalled to Sam Fragoso.  “About what’s going on in the world.”

He then detailed how a comment from his mother helped him shape his speech, before referring to his partner by her first name.

“I think [my brother] signed autographs, I can’t remember where it comes from, or it was a lyric,” he said. In his Oscars speech, Phoenix mentioned a lyric written by his late brother, River Phoenix. “And Rooney was like, ‘That’s what you should f***ing say.’”

Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara in 2023 (Getty Images)

However, Phoenix didn’t further clarify whether he and Mara are actually married or not. The Independent has contacted representatives for Phoenix and Mara for comment.

The longtime couple were first romantically linked in 2017, while working on the film Mary Magdalene. They had met four years prior on the set of Her, which came out in 2013. The pair were privately engaged in 2019.

However, during a 2019 interview with Vanity Fair, Phoenix confessed that he didn’t initially like Mara when they met on the set of Her. He later discovered that she was just a little shy and she actually liked him. “She’s the only girl I ever looked up on the internet,” he explained. “We were just friends, email friends. I’d never done that. Never looked up a girl online.”

Mara and Phoenix welcomed their first child, son River, in 2020. There’s also special meaning behind the name, as River was the name of Joaquin’s late brother, who died at the age of 23 in October 1993.

One year later, Phoenix opened up about his approaches to parenting. While he’s been a vegan since he was a child, the actor maintained that wasn’t going to “force” his son to follow his eating habits.

“Certainly I would hope that [he is vegan], but I’m not going to impose my belief on my child. I don’t think that’s right,” he told The Sunday Times in 2021. “I’m going to educate him about the reality. I’m not going to indoctrinate him with the idea that McDonald’s have a Happy Meal because there’s nothing f***ing happy about that meal. And I’m not going to tell him that it’s OK to read books about all the wonderful little farm animals, and they say ‘oink oink oink’ and ‘moo moo moo,’ and not tell him that that’s what a hamburger is.”

In February, Mara posed with her growing baby bump at the Berlin Film Festival, revealing that she and her partner are having another baby. They reportedly welcomed their second child in September 2024.