Affleck rejects ‘inverted snobbery’
LOS ANGELES – Ben Affleck is taking a 180-degree turn and enjoying the ride.
After some half-dozen roles in small, independent films – capped by the extraordinary success of Good Will Hunting, which he co-wrote – Affleck is pursuing a radically different direction: a major role in this summer’s expected blockbuster Armageddon, a $140 million asteroid-pounds-Earth movie that stars Bruce Willis.
“It’s a study in contrasts,” Affleck says during a break on the Armageddon set. “A big visual epic is almost like a totally different medium from the kind of films I’ve made, which are very much about words and small stories about people.”
Good Will Hunting is the closest Affleck’s come to mainstream success (his other films include Dazed and Confused and Chasing Amy). He and buddy Matt Damon, who also stars in Good Will, have gotten an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The film received eight other nominations, including best picture, and is heading for the $100 million mark, rare for an independent film.
“I think Good Will Hunting is pretty straight-ahead stuff,” Affleck says. “But people said it’s a smarter-than-average movie, therefore inherently limited. I think that’s kind of insulting. It’s not like it was about Nietzsche or some obtuse or contradictory concepts. I think there’s a perfectly large range of people in this country that can understand and appreciate this movie. It’s going to make $100 million. It’s going to do what Con Air did. So there you go. That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says a movie has to have X, Y and Z components to make money.”
He quickly defends such indy flicks, but Affleck is no film snob. Lethal Weapon is one of his favorites, so he is quick to defend his Armageddon role.
“People sort of look down their noses at me, like, ‘Why are you doing this movie?’ ” he says. “I don’t even understand that inverted snobbery. . . . Frankly, I find it flattering that they hold my independent career in such high regard. I never realized anybody thought I was Joe Integrity before. It’s like I’ve discovered integrity I never knew I had.”
Discovering fears, fame
Affleck has been discovering a lot lately. While filming Armageddon, he and co-star Willis were the only civilians ever allowed to take a dip in NASA’s neutral buoyancy laboratory, which prepares astronauts for the experience of weightlessness.
The experience initially made Affleck uneasy.
First, he was intimidated by the 200-pound spacesuit like those worn by real astronauts: “They make you very aware that it cost $10 million, so don’t break it.”
Then, fear set in: “I was more claustrophobic than I thought I would be. It’s scary because you can’t swim away if you started drowning. There was a moment when I was getting submerged where I thought, ‘Am I going to have to put a stop to this whole thing because I’m just freaking out?’
“I just had to will myself to grin and bear it. Then I started having a good time. In fact, I had too good a time; I started telling dirty jokes to the astronauts. I figured, ‘Astronauts, they’ve got the right stuff. They’re guys’ guys.’ I started telling them, ‘I’ll introduce you to Cindy Crawford,’ whom I’d never even met, and generally entertaining them with wild, fabricated stories of Hollywood debauchery. Until I heard over the speaker: ‘There are some schoolchildren visiting.'”
Stardom seems to make Affleck contemplative.
“It’s weird, but it’s also hollow,” he says. “When you see how the media can just so quickly create a name. . . . It’s hard for me to believe people really know who I am. I was walking through a hotel lobby the other day and this lady goes, ‘Oh, my God! It’s Ben Affleck, there’s Ben Affleck!’ The lady with her looks right at me and goes, ‘Where? Where? Where?’ I tend to think they think I’m someone else. I feel like saying, ‘Have you really seen anything I’ve done? You don’t really know me. It’s just like a name you’ve heard.’ ”
Then, as if on cue, Affleck, who has been chatting while nearly inhaling an Asian beef and noodles dish in his trailer, interrupts himself. His appearance on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, filmed the day before, is on TV. He is wearing the same black jeans, boots and black shirt for this interview as he did on O’Donnell’s show, making the experience of watching Affleck watch Affleck all the more startling.
He ambles onto O’Donnell’s set, and shrieks erupt from the studio audience.
“It’s sort of surreal, all this publicity,” he says. “It’s difficult to conceive how many people will see Rosie. It’s not easy to understand the power of television. It’s also important not to confuse that with importance. Just because a lot of people know something nominal doesn’t make it important. A lot of people know what a pencil sharpener is, but that doesn’t make it the most important invention of the 20th century.”
The segment on Rosie goes smoothly. Affleck, charmingly self-deprecating, seems like a talk-show veteran. He laughs about his shirtless cover photo on GQ magazine (joking that his stomach muscles actually belong to Fabio) and even croons Leaving on a Jet Plane to Rosie, decidedly off-key.
Rosie pronounces him “saucy and smouldering.”

“I’m used to boring people,” says Affleck. “Nobody wanted to listen to my little lame jokes and one-liners before, but now they flash the laugh sign and I get big laughs.”
‘Wonderful, nice’ Paltrow
Minutes later, Gwyneth Paltrow, Affleck’s new girlfriend, phones from London. Affleck’s low, almost hoarse voice rises several octaves when he hears hers. “Oh, my God! How are you, my sweet?” Then he politely asks if he can have a few minutes alone to take “this very important phone call.”
“She’s a wonderful, nice person,” Affleck says later, adding with a coy smile: “And we’re very good friends. I think she’s one of the finest young actresses around.”

The two met in their youth when her mother (actress Blythe Danner) and his father worked in theater. They were reintroduced recently and have been a favorite paparazzi target at such places as the Sundance Film Festival and Golden Globes.
Despite the flurry of attention over Good Will Hunting – a Golden Globe Award, the Oscar nomination and Writers Guild nomination – Affleck, who was scheduled to fly to London to visit Paltrow shortly after this interview, says his life is actually calmer and more settled than it’s been in quite a while.
“I go to work and I go home,” he says. “I’ve been working on Armageddon for almost seven months. It’s like the most stable my life has been in years. It’s like a regular job. I can’t say it’s 9-to-5 – it’s more like 7-to-10 – but I come in in the morning, and I go to work with the same people.”
Despite being half of a Hollywood golden couple and in demand by casting directors all over town, Affleck remains endearingly cynical about celebrity and media hype.
“It’s called the Spears Prosciutto Syndrome,” he says. “When journalists write about celebrities, instead of just saying, ‘Johnny Depp takes a bite of ham,’ it’s ‘Johnny Depp spears prosciutto, and his eyes smolder.’ Before he made movies, I’m sure he just ate ham like everybody else. . . . It’s the same way things get sensationalized in general. You’ve got to make a story out of something. So the actor gets to spear prosciutto, and the reporter doesn’t have to say, ‘Yeah, I met the guy, we had some ham and talked about a few things, and then he left.’ ”
And with that, Affleck eats some beef, talks about a few more things and leaves – back to work.
By Claudia Puig, USA TODAY