Ben Affleck is on top of the world. At 25, he won the Academy Awardwith his boyhood friend, Matt Damon, for their screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.” And now he is asought-after actor.

But sudden success has created a surprise or two for him.

“Because the movie business is such a sort of brass ring, theconsequence is the deification of people in the business,” he said. “And the biggest surprise is, strangely,how normal and fallible the gods and demigods are in the business. You run across your heroes and, believeit or not, they’re not unlike the people you went to high school with.”

(Maybe it depends on the high school.)

Affleck has a top role in “Armageddon.” (“I’m Bruce Willis’ protégé,and I’m also the guy he finds in bed with his daughter, who’s played by Liv Tyler,” he said.) He’s nowin London completing “Shakespeare in Love,” a romantic comedy; he has already finished”Dogma,” a religious satire with, among others, Damon, Chris Rock and Linda Fiorentino. And he’s set tostart “Forces of Nature,” a love story with Sandra Bullock.

Affleck seems to look on the sudden avalanche of money and fame witha cool distance. “Success tends to just exacerbate the personality traits you already have,” hesaid. “In other words, a guy who’s unpleasant and irritating and insecure becomes more so with fame andmoney. If you’re a bad person at the outset, then power gives you a license to visit yourunpleasant personality traits on other people.

“And then there are guys like Robin Williams, who’s enormouslycompassionate, who visits hospitals when you never hear about it, who gives money away withoutannouncing. Guys like that were compassionate from the outset.”

Affleck said he tried to maintain a normal life. “You have to policeyourself because the tendency is to get spoiled and accustomed to preferential treatment,” he said.

If there’s one downside to success, he said, it’s that relationshipswith friends and family change. “There’s a different dynamic,” he said. “And your family shares theburden of having to answer questions in supermarket checkout lines. ‘Oh, Affleck,’ the clerksays. ‘Any relation to Ben?’ Because of me, their lives have changed, and I haven’t asked theirpermission.”

“If I have any regret, it’s that I didn’t change my name to afford myfamily more privacy,” he said.