Ben Affleck knows why actor-turned-directors Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty are such gods to a younger generation of actors.
“What really sets them apart is that they don’t seem to need to please other people,” says Affleck, whose directorial debut, “Gone Baby Gone,” opens Friday.
That last observation is accompanied by a rueful smile, since Affleck is self-aware enough to know that trying to please people has played a large role in his own fall from grace, a fall hastened by the tabloid fascination with his brief engagement to Jennifer Lopez.
Over the last decade, he’s gone from Sundance sensation (“Chasing Amy”) to Oscar-winning screenwriter (“Good Will Hunting”) to Michael Bay-blockbuster movie star (“Pearl Harbor”) to “Bennifer”-era-tabloid subject of derision (“Gigli”). After several box-office duds, his last film, “Man About Town,” never got a theatrical release.
You know times are hard when the Onion runs a photo of a forlorn you with the headline: “Ben Affleck Hoping Jason Bourne Has Sidekick in Next Movie.” A passionate baseball fan, Affleck offers a blunt assessment of how Hollywood views his acting career at the moment: “You don’t get four strikes.”
So how did someone so smart end up in so many dumb movies? At 35, Affleck is still boyishly handsome, but the scars from his career choices and tabloid tormentors aren’t far from the surface.
Just last week he found himself being quoted in the tabloids — falsely he says — complaining that former love Jennifer Lopez had “hurt his career.”
“[It] not only makes me look like a petulant fool, but it surely qualifies as ungentlemanly. For the record, did she hurt my career? No,” he says.
For Affleck, the painful Bennifer experience can be boiled down to a mantra-like life lesson: “What you do speaks for you.”
That seems to be the guiding principle behind tackling “Gone Baby Gone,” a dark, disturbing thriller about the search for a missing child. Shot in blue-collar Boston and adorned with a stellar cast that includes Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman and Amy Ryan, the film cost $19 million.
Affleck cast his little brother, Casey Affleck, in the film’s leading role, playing Patrick Kenzie, the dogged private investigator who refuses to give up his search for the missing child, no matter where it might lead.
The movie showcases Affleck’s gift for coaxing great performances out of his actors, most notably Casey, who has won raves. But the film also has earned praise for the unstinting way it grapples with difficult moral choices, reminding us that doing the right thing is often a true test of character. In Hollywood, Affleck has garnered more sympathy than most tabloid targets, perhaps because of his resilience — he’s taken the hits and he’s still standing — or because he’s hardly a vapid celebrity diva. He recently returned from a trip to Tanzania in support of the One campaign that works to combat extreme poverty.
Affleck offers what is perhaps the most trenchant analysis of how he became a media target.
“The first half of the media cycle was fascination; the second half of the cycle was rejection,” he says. “What I never realized was that the public doesn’t end up blaming the magazines that write every insane, untrue story … they blame the subjects of the story, who they believe are pushing themselves in their face.”
Affleck sighs. “That turned out to be me, even though by that point I wasn’t pushing anything. I was hiding in the basement.”
Affleck isn’t trying to let himself off the hook. He takes pains to say that when it came to his career choices, “only the mistakes are mine.”
As he attempts a new chapter in his career, he is determined to avoid trying to please people. His mistakes, as he sees it, were “basing decisions on what I imagined others might think versus my own personal sense of direction, the simple gut level, ‘Do I think this is a good idea?'”
