There was a time when Ben Affleck was known as more than just the dashing Hollywood leading man who married women called Jennifer. He has, for one thing, also been the public and avowed best friend of that other Hollywood leading man, Matt Damon.
Earlier this week, taking a stroll down memory lane, Affleck sat down for a candid interview with GQ where he dissected his most beloved (and some not so beloved) films. Because after all, for those of us who are not Damon or either of the Jennifers that Affleck has been romantically linked with, the man will simultaneously be synonymous as Daredevil, a an ill-at-ease husband in Gone Girl, and the bewildered actor who genuinely questioned why the plot of Armageddon involved training oil riggers to become astronauts instead of teaching astronauts how to drill a hole. In his own words, through the lens of GQ, here are some of his highlights.
On faking genius
It was Affleck’s partnership with Damon for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting, in which he plays a supporting role opposite his best friend that led to one of cinema’s most iconic mathematical geniuses: Will. As in, the brilliant but troubled young man, Will Hunting. Good or otherwise.
“As far as I know, neither Matt nor I are geniuses, so getting into the mind of a genius wasn’t going to be literally or even metaphorically possible,” began Affleck. “The idea of a character who has special abilities is very appealing. It’s at the root of every superhero film.”
Damon’s Will is a janitor at MIT, where, to ward off boredom, he solves an equation left out for students. For Affleck, Will’s janitorial role was a key aspect of his character. “My father had that job at Harvard,” shared Affleck. “He was a janitor. At the time, I, like a lot of young people or maybe older people, really wanted my dad to be a hero.”
Having paid homage to his father, Affleck returned to the crux of the problem at hand: inhibiting the mind of a genius.
“Part of the trick is to not have to show the whole thing, but to sort of have to hint at it,” he explained. “Matt and I couldn’t even name the kind of math he was doing. We really just faked it.”
It was either faking it or outsourcing the work – a strategy both Damon and Affleck ruthlessly employed by placing blind trust in the brains of others. “When we had to have elaborate sophisticated mathematical solutions, we called on people who could do that,” noted Affleck. “We had mathematicians at MIT who did stuff for us and you know, they could have totally made it up.”
Asking the right questions
In addition to Good Will Hunting, there was at least one other film where Affleck got to interact with bonafide brainiacs: Armageddon.
“I got to walk on the space shuttle!” recalled the (still wowed) actor. “We had an actual space suit, and they had this huge tank full of water and this life size space shuttle built into it – they just let us go into that briefly, and it was a very rarefied experience.”
The experience remains a hallmark for Affleck, a jewel in his glittering film career. “That’s when I started realising that these people are very highly skilled and trained and we’re doing a movie where it’s easier to, you know, train oil drillers to be astronauts than it is for astronauts to drill a hole in the ground,” he said wryly.
Paying tribute to the lengths filmmakers once went to, Affleck added, “I’m really lucky I got a chance to be in what I now think of as an old-fashioned movie, where you travelled around the globe and went to real places. When visual effects came along, you stopped having to go anywhere! Now they’d just put the space shuttle in behind you. We actually filmed the space shuttle take-off!”
Becoming a superhero
In this age of superheroes, it can be difficult to attain the status of a Hollywood star without putting on some kind of superhero suit – and Affleck has not disappointed, even if his initial foray into the Daredevil universe may not quite have been what he had hoped for.
“I loved the comic book,” recalled the actor, and went on to confess, “I loved working with Jen Garner, but it wasn’t the adaptation that was ultimately the best.”
Fortunately for Affleck, there are plenty more fish in the sea vis a vis superheroes – a fact that he proved during his stint as Batman in Batman v Superman.
“No regrets,” he said right off the bat. “I love being in Detroit and I really liked the core notion of this super hero who has this very iconic kind of legendary image in the public consciousness.”
Looking back, Affleck admitted that actually, he did have one small regret with taking on the superhero role. “I loved doing it and loved making it and I guess my regret about making that movie is that when I went to show it to my son at the time, I thought, ‘Okay, he’s totally too scared to watch it’, so I lost out on that thing of being, like, Batman to my son.”
Affleck reprised his Batman role in The Flash, and here, the actor had one particular rant he had to get off his chest about the cons of becoming Gotham’s best-known superhero.
“I hated the batsuit,” he stated with conviction. “Batsuits are horrendous to wear. They’re hot and you can’t breathe. There is no thought put in [for] the human being. You just start sweating. In that thing, you would just be pouring water.”
Unfortunately for Affleck, that restrictive batsuit is going to live rent-free in his head. “There’s one thing to wear the suit, but once you cover your head? I guess that’s where all your heat kind of escapes, and you feel it,” he continued. “Even the more highly trained stunt guys – they can do that for like 45-50 minutes, and then they’re going to get heat stroke. So you have to come out of it, and that really made it difficult to make the movie, because you get so hot.”
Love him for his long-standing devotion to Damon or loathe him for the Jennifer(s) situation, it is impossible to deny that with or without heat trapping costumes, the self-effacing Affleck has accrued a wide gamut of roles since he first embarked on his career.
#Bens #affection #geniuses
