After years of slipshod performances in dire movies, Ben Affleck has reorganised his career and come back strong with an offbeat role as a troubled TV star in Hollywoodland. Donald Clarkemeets an actor determined to make good on his early promise.
WHEN, in 1997, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, then two mostly unknowns from Boston, got themselves noticed after writing and starring in Good Will Hunting, many pundits correctly predicted divergent career paths for the young men. Those seers would, perhaps, not have been surprised to hear that, come the autumn of 2006, one actor would be in Waterloo Station shooting the third part of a hugely successful spy franchise, while the other, following a career with more stops than starts, would find himself up the road in the Dorchester Hotel promoting a modestly budgeted film in which he effects a low-key comeback.
You can see where this is going. While Damon, chubbier, less immediately heroic, seemed to be destined for a life in independent film, Affleck, squarer of jaw, like a comic-book hero made flesh, had the aura of a mainstream film star about him. Yet Matt has ended up in such hits as Saving Private Ryan, Ocean's 11, The Departed and - hence the trip to Waterloo - the Bourne films. Ben had to settle for Daredevil, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.
By the middle of this decade, reduced to such atrocities as Gigli and Jersey Girl, Affleck generated more stories through his romantic adventures - he was attached to Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez before winding up with Jennifer Garner - than through his efforts as an actor.
"I have had enough good times and enough bad times to get a fair perspective on things," Affleck tells me. "The next film might tank and I will have to listen to a lot of people taking shots at me. Who knows? I've seen high and lows. When things go well, that doesn't make me feel like some genius. Nor will I allow the next disappointment to make me feel like a complete failure."
Happily for Affleck, a fast, enthusiastic talker with an endearing line in self-deprecation, his latest film, the dark, consistently fascinating Hollywoodland, has finally secured him plaudits and awards. Telling the story of the troubled life of George Reeves, who played Superman on television before apparently committing suicide in 1959, Allen Coulter's coiled exercise in noir offers Affleck the opportunity to revisit some of the discomforts that come with sudden fame. His performance is sufficiently effective to have won him the best actor gong at the Venice Film Festival and a nomination for a Golden Globe. This is one of the good times, I guess.
"I have not been so lavished with acting awards that I have become blasé about it," he laughs. "I don't get overexcited about the good stuff. And I don't beat myself up about the mistakes I've made. My Mom will do that for me. Hey, you have to be tough, otherwise you end up like George Reeves."
Ben Affleck, trim and fit-looking at 34, has had quite some time to get used to the ups and downs of show business life. Born in California and raised in Massachusetts, he was propelled into movies at the age of seven when a friend of his mother's secured him a role in an indie film, The Dark End of the Street. Later he made several appearances on television before taking a few years off to study.
"Because I was a child actor, I never had to face that moment where you say: is this what I want to do? I was already in there. Then I stopped and was in high school and had to think about that question. I just plainly liked doing it. The worry was it made me feel too much like an adult. I don't mean that I was a little snot, but I was maybe too much of a good little soldier. I was, I think, overworked. If I had a son I wouldn't do that to him."
Really? Affleck has already suggested that his mother can be quite fearsome. Does he now resent her treatment of him when he was a juvenile actor? "Oh, not at all. She tried her best and I would always say to her that I wanted to do it. I never felt misused or anything."
Realising he was destined to be an actor, the teenage Affleck dropped out of the University of Vermont and made his way to LA and fitful employment. He appeared in films by Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith (still a friend), but it was not until Good Will Hunting that the world began to take notice. Telling the story of a maths prodigy (Matt) and his ordinary-Joe buddy (Ben), the film was sufficiently well regarded to secure the boys the Oscar for best original screenplay.
"We wrote it carefully to highlight our talents," Affleck explains. "Like we set the film in Boston as we could both do the accents. Matt wanted to show off the fact that he could cry, so we wrote that in. The whole thing was put together to showcase our particular abilities and get us work."
Ironically, despite their explicit attempts to spotlight their acting gifts, they won their Academy Awards as writers.
"Yeah, it was crazy in a way. We didn't know what we were doing really. We're not writers. We're actors. All we could think was: we didn't even write this, we improvised it and then typed it out."
While Damon made some very smart choices in the years after Good Will Hunting, his old friend began by signing up for big dumb blockbusters (forgivable), before moving on to big dumb disappointments (unfortunate) and eventually ending up in small dumb flops (suicidal). On the way from one sort of Armageddon to another, he found himself constantly in the tabloids. The coverage of his relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow was respectful but, by the time he hitched up with J-Lo, he had been re-imagined as one end of a risible pantomime horse.
If Ben is remembered for nothing else, he will be recognised as the opening syllable of the first portmanteau word coined to describe a celebrity couple. They were Benifer. We have since had Vaughniston and TomKat. It is, I suppose, some sort of achievement.
"I was kind of stubborn and a little bit stupid when I got famous," he says. "I got this naive idea that I wasn't going to be a phoney. I was going to live my life exactly as I wanted to. I knew what was real and I wasn't going to change my life because there were photographers outside my house. Fuck them!"
Over the last two years, Affleck has clearly been through a change. Aware that his career wasn't going as well as he might have liked, he took two years out to get married and reconsider his options. Jennifer Garner, the athletic star of Alias and Elektra, gave birth to the couple's first daughter, Violet, in 2005 and Affleck greatly welcomed the calming effect the new arrival had on his life.
"I was already ready to become dull at that point," he says. "I had had enough partying and being crazy and running around. Having the baby reinforced what a good a good decision it was to change that side of my life. I now want to like my life and here is somebody who is going to carry my last name around. I want her to be proud of that name. I keep thinking I had better keep it the fuck together, so that the Affleck name remains a good thing to have."
Cleaning up the Affleck name also required that some attention be paid to his professional life. The last two films he made before taking time off, Gigli and Surviving Christmas, were as unlovely as anything in his career. Hollywoodland stands as a very successful relaunch of the brand. To play Reeves - a supporting role, but a very major one - Affleck fattened up and allowed a touching degree of vulnerability to show through his performance. It looks as if he did the right sort of thinking during his period away from the cameras.
"I took that time off because I just didn't like seeing my face all the time in the tabloids. I also didn't like how the movies had turned out. It was horrible. I just spent time sorting out what I wanted. I came across this script and immediately decided to take a massive pay cut to do it. I actually realised that part of the reason I wasn't happy previously was that the amount of money they were paying me had become more important than the movies themselves."
Affleck, unless he is a better actor than I have previously taken him to be, does seem to be genuinely at ease with himself. Currently directing his brother Casey in his own adaptation of Denis Lehane's novel Gone Baby Gone - the first feature Ben has written since Good Will Hunting - he looks capable of escaping the rut he slipped into at the end of the 1990s. Pitfalls may, however, present themselves.
Is he really as relaxed as he claims about the negative criticism that comes his way? "Hey, if the movies are shit the press will say that. So what. Look, I don't need the press to tell me if a film doesn't work. I know myself in advance if something is shit." Sensible fellow.
