A 1991 portrait of River Phoenix.(Photo: Nancy R. Schiff, Getty Images)

Samantha Mathis was with her boyfriend, River Phoenix, when he died Oct. 31, 1993, of a drug overdose outside of Los Angeles’ famed Viper Club.

Mathis is breaking her silence about the tragic death 25 years ago.

“I knew something was wrong that night, something I didn’t understand,” the “American Psycho” actress said in an interview with Britain’s The Guardian. “I didn’t see anyone doing drugs but he was high in a way that made me feel uncomfortable – I was in way over my head.”

Mathis said she and Phoenix were with his siblings Leaf (now known as Joaquin) and Rain, and were only stopping by the nightclub, then partly owned by Johnny Depp. But the musician Phoenix switched the plans.

“He said to me: ‘Oh, there are some people playing music tonight in the club who want me to play with them – that’s OK, right?’” Mathis recalled. “Forty-five minutes later, he was dead.”

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Mathis has never spoken about the death, when she and Phoenix were both just 23, “Except to my therapist,” she said in the interview. But the actress saw for the first time the last movie Phoenix completed before he died, which she co-starred in, “The Thing Called Love.”

It felt like a sign that “the universe wanted me to talk about him.”

Mathis said she came out of the Viper Room bathroom and saw what she thought was Phoenix in a scuffle with another man, and the two of them were pushed out of the club’s side door by a bouncer. After that, she saw Phoenix fall to the pavement in convulsions. 

“What have you done? What are you on?” Mathis said she shouted at the other man, who responded: “Leave him alone, you’re spoiling his high.”

Phoenix had died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin before paramedics arrived.

Mathis recalled the actor as “sensitive and obsessive. He felt things on his heart very deeply.”

“I’m looking at a photo of him now, oh wow …” Mathis said in the phone interview. “I think if River was still here, I think he’d be acting, directing, saving the environment, just living and hanging out. Oh gosh, wouldn’t that be nice?”

 

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