THERAPY DADDY

PHIL STUTZ has made a career in Hollywood doing what most psychologists advise against: telling his patients exactly what to do.

- LILA SHAPIRO

A couple of years ago, the actor and filmmaker Jonah Hill made a documentary about his psychiatrist, Phil Stutz. In the film, titled Stutz, the two men do all sorts of things that therapists and their clients usually avoid. They say "I love you" to each other. They joke like immature schoolboys. Stutz makes a crack about banging Hill's mother. At one point, Hill says his previous therapists kept him at "a massive distance." What he always wanted, he says, was someone who would tell him what to do, but they would all just sit and listen or ask him how he felt. Stutz, charismatic and gruff, is different. As he puts it in the film, he tells patients, "Do what the fuck I tell you. Do exactly what I tell you. I guarantee you'll feel better."

Over the past decade or so, before this film and certainly afterward, Stutz has become one of the most famous therapists in the world, if not quite as famous as his celebrity patients. They include John Cusack, John Stamos, and Joaquin Phoenix, along with many actors, studio heads, writers, and agents who prefer to not speak in public about their therapy. Since opening his practice in Los Angeles in 1982, he has treated so many Oscar winners that he formulated something he refers to as the Stutz 96-Hour Academy Awards Principle (by the fourth day after winning, life sucks again). His popularity derives in part from the perception that he is something more than a therapist, something akin to a spiritual guide. Cusack called him a “wizard in the heart of the make-believe factory.” Erin Cressida Wilson, who wrote the film Secretary, described feeling like Stutz was going into “a sort of trance,” as if he were “casting a spell.” Given his clientele, Stutz has, perhaps inevitably, inspired depictions on the screen. Last year’s feel-good Apple TV+ dramedy