LOS ANGELES, July 9
At 25, Ben Affleck knows he’s up to his neck in paradox. At precisely the moment when Hollywood stands ready to shove him into a box labeled “hunk” or “genius,” he sees the danger of being mythicized into something unreal.
So he’s playing the Hollywood kind of Russian roulette young talent always has played, dancing with the system, but also dancing away from it. That’s why he made such risky choices as taking roles in “Dogma,” in which he and co-Oscar winner Matt Damon play fallen angels exiled to Wisconsin, and the independent project “200 Cigarettes,” with Courtney Love and his brother, Casey. But at the same time he can currently be seen in every multiplex in America starring as a trouble-shooter saving Earth from a Texas-size asteroid in “Armageddon,” the summer’s biggest action movie, and is already at work on a sure-fire hit romantic comedy that teams him Sandra Bullock.
“I can’t tell you how weird it is,” Affleck says of his sudden stardom. “One lady was standing behind me and she was like brushing up against me and she was like, ‘I’m touching him, I’m touching him.’ I thought, ‘This is insanity.’ ”
One could understand how a fan might get carried away. Affleck posses an enviable collection of blessings. He is strikingly good-looking, with the face reminiscent of a young Paul Newman and the body of a well-toned athlete. He is talented, even managing to add some depth to the cardboard character he plays in “Armageddon.” And he has the vocabulary of a college professor.
Instead of rejoicing in taking the Hollywood plunge, Affleck is a little worried about what he’s getting into. “It’s a concern to me, being cut off from real life,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen to people’s careers who I don’t know really well, but I hear about how their lives changed. You see their work and it becomes less and less something you can relate to. It’s less and less about real life because you stop having real experiences to draw upon. It’s a real danger. In addition, it’s a danger to your personality if you’re surrounded by people who just want to be around you for sycophantic reasons or because they think it makes them look cool. I realize in a poignant way that our world is only what’s in our immediate perception. And if that reality becomes corrupted, then your perception of the world can be corrupted.”
When he signed to do “Armageddon,” Affleck thought it would be the movie that meant, for the first time, big exposure. “But when ‘Good Will Hunting’ came out and was so high-profile, it staved off the questions of, like, who you are. At least going in I felt I had some kind of credibility and didn’t feel like a complete impostor.” Still, Affleck says, he initially stumbled over the differences between this, his first big-budget production, and the independent films he had done. “Coming from the ‘Star Wars’ generation, I always wanted to do one of these movies,” Affleck says, “and I loved the chance of working with Billy Bob Thornton, Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson. … Billy Bob is like my hero, so rather than be obsequious about it, I had to try and make fun of him. I would kid him about being a hillbilly with an IQ of 30. But Billy Bob has a much crueler sense of humor than I do.” But shooting a “Star Wars”-style movie is not without its hazards. Affleck began his portion of the shoot several weeks before Willis, and ended up serving as a guinea pig for many of the films high-tech props.
“Once (Willis) showed up, he was funny and self-deprecating and he cared. Still, it was difficult for me to adjust. I felt intimidated by the scope of the movie, and by the company I was keeping.
“Once I figured out that I had to draw a little more broadly to compete with the kind of histrionics and cacophony that were going on, it became easy. … At first, I felt like a reject from ‘Lost in Space.’ It was only because I had the luxury of a long shoot that I had the chance to make some adjustments and eventually grew comfortable and relaxed a little bit and became ultimately proud of my performance.”
Meanwhile, Affleck is sensitive enough and idealistic enough to worry about his friendship with Damon being commercialized into a commodity. “Before we were successful, we lived together and hung out together with a bunch of other guys from Cambridge (Mass.). Now that we’re busy, I don’t see him enough. That’s one of the things that make it hard to keep writing. We’re working on a new script, but ‘working’ is the operative word, and to say that it’s unfinished is an understatement. Ironically, the success of the first project is what makes it difficult to actually do the same thingagain. I thought the whole point of being successful is that you get the opportunity to keep doing it. I didn’t think it would be as much apreventative device as an opportunistic one.”
Affleck is now at work on “Shakespeare in Love,” a romance in which he co-stars with his real-life girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. Affleck describes the picture as “It’s like ‘Bullets Over Broadway,’ except that it’s ‘Swords Over Shakespeare.’ ”
Affleck doesn’t care to discuss his relationship with Paltrow, other than to confirm the two are very happy together. “I’ve made enough mistakes to realize that one of the things that’s really important is to keep a certain part of your life to yourself,” he says. “The point of an intimate relationship is that it’s intimate. You don’t make yourself vulnerable to the world … it’s to that person.”
And judging from the way Affleck discusses his reverence for his school-teacher mother, Paltrow isn’t even the most important woman in hislife.
“The thing I enjoyed about the Oscars is that I was able to share it with (my Mom). It wasn’t just my experience or my and Matt’s experience. Bringing our moms made it seem more real. … She met a lot of people out there, but my mom is not star-struck. … She spent most of her time saying, ‘I thought he was kind of sleazy.’ And I said, ‘Well, guess what, Mom? They’re all sleazy. You’re not visiting a monastery. You’re visiting, you know, Sodom and Gomorrah. This is the sleaze center of the universe.”
