“It really doesn’t come down to X vs Y so much as X vs nothing.” “It’s not as if actors are turning down something way better,” he once told me. In a recent interview with Damon, Affleck joked about feeling “deeply jealous and developing a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing” but it wasn’t entirely a joke: he wasn’t getting the same opportunities.
Affleck became an action star in Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and The Sum of All Fears, none of which played to his strengths. Damon moved into prestige pictures such as Saving Private Ryan and The Talented Mr Ripley, before striking oil with the Bourne franchise. Their next moves compounded that stereotype of art vs commerce. I still remember a waspish line from Esquire’s film critic, to the effect that Ben Affleck was put on the earth for the sole purpose of making Matt Damon look like the clever one. So when he and Damon broke through in 1997 with their Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting, the impression was that, off screen as well as on, Damon was the star and Affleck the sidekick. He graduated to doofus in Chasing Amy but even his nicer characters weren’t very smart. Handsome in a brash and bro-ish way, with an oblong head and beefy, six-foot-four physique, Affleck started out playing jerks in School Ties, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats. In a 2016 Buzzfeed profile called “The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck”, Anne-Helen Petersen argued that his defining feature was shame: “about the roles that he’s taken, the relationships he’s made public, his lack of education, his drinking habits, and, most recently, his tattoo”. He always has something to prove, and something to atone for. Self-consciousness about his class and education has been a nagging drumbeat throughout his career. While star student Damon went to Harvard, the bright but distractable Affleck dropped out of the University of Vermont after a few months. Affleck met Damon at school and the two travelled to auditions together, but their paths diverged. Their father was a sometime actor, a gambler and an alcoholic. As Dave Itzkoff wrote in a 2016 New York Times profile, “ you may find yourself envying, pitying and disliking him all at once”.Īffleck was born into a working-class family in California and grew up in Massachusetts with his younger brother Casey, who also became an actor.
Affleck, with his candidly acknowledged flaws and regrets, is Cruise’s opposite.
BATMAN THUMBS UP MOVIE
Tom Cruise, who recently turned 60, is perhaps the last true movie star due to his somewhat inhuman denial of vulnerability. He has never enjoyed an imperial phase, when he could do no wrong, nor a real Benaissance, when all is forgiven. He is of the same generation as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Ethan Hawke and his friend Matt Damon, but he’s the one whose career best illustrates the ups and downs of modern movie stardom, on and off the screen. Newly married to Jennifer Lopez (we’ll get to that), Affleck turns 50 today. Shortly afterwards, Affleck checked into rehab. Before that, there was a meme called Sad Keanu, but Reeves’s apparent dejection suggested a melancholy profundity whereas Sad Ben was just a middle-aged man with a cigarette and a paunch, attracting an odd mix of sympathy and mockery despite his history of anxiety, depression and alcoholism. One image in particular - cigarette in hand, head thrown back, an expression of weary exasperation - has become a meme which roughly translates as “Fuck everything”. A few years ago, when the actor was separating from his wife Jennifer Garner and glumly promoting Batman v Superman, somebody started a Tumblr page called “ Ben Affleck Looking Sad“.
But there appears to be an exception for Ben Affleck. It is now generally agreed that there is something grubby about enjoying paparazzi photographs, especially when the subject has mental health issues.
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