8. Joaquin Phoenix - I'm Still Here (2010)
One day a few years ago, Joaquin Phoenix woke up and decided that he wanted to make himself look like a bit of a douchebag, and - alongside brother-in-law Casey Affleck - devised an incredibly unnecessary and elaborate hoax that deconstructed the idea of the "celebrity meltdown" and method acting to the point in which nobody actually cared. To create the illusion that he had gone insane, Phoenix lost himself in a newly-devised persona that saw him growing a huge beard and telling David Letterman that he was bound for a career in hip-hop. This all culminated in the arrival of the mockumentary
I'm Still Here, which - at the time of its release - everybody thought was real. It later turned out that Phoenix was simply acting a character and Affleck was in on the joke. I mean, it was an interesting experiment, I guess, but the public weren't really enamoured with the concept in the way I think those two expected them to be (it made less than a $1 million at the box office), especially when they found out that it was all for the sake of art or something. It was, uh, kind of embarrassing.