Ben Affleck
Ben Affleck
Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt, better known as Ben Affleck, is an American actor and filmmaker. He began his career as a child actor, starring in the PBS educational series The Voyage of the Mimi. He later appeared in the coming-of-age comedy Dazed and Confusedand various Kevin Smith films including Chasing Amyand Dogma. Affleck gained fame when he and childhood friend Matt Damon won the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting. He then starred in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth15 August 1972
CityBerkeley, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I just feel like sometimes I'm a force to be dealt with. My talents are sometimes overused and also sometimes underused. It's not easy being me.
One of the differences between now and then is that the idea of body image is a much bigger issue now. Back then, just being kind of heavy and barrel-chested passed for heroic. Now, you wouldn't dare to play a hero without a lot of dieting and various specialised abdomen machines. But that was one of the things which was interesting about it and I did want to portray because there's good and bad.
I grew up in a home environment where I wasn't getting esteem for anything I did.
My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.
God help me if I ever do another movie with an explosion in it. If you see me in a movie where stuff is exploding you'll know I've lost all my money.
Everyone's entitled to express their political beliefs. I don't presume to tell anybody who to vote for. I am comfortable telling people what my opinions are.
Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity.
There's something really great and romantic about being poor and sleeping on couches.
It's much nicer to be praised than to be damned. But you have to have a certain sense of your own priorities and ideas about what works and what doesn't because otherwise, if you're just looking for eternal validation all the time, you can be motivated by the wrong things and I don't think it's as personally satisfying in your own work.
As an actor, you can steer a scene in another direction by playing it a little differently. And honestly? I like being an actor, and I want to keep having a career.
I've finally learnt how to say, 'No comment'. To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt.
Rumors about me? Calista Flockhart, Pam Anderson, and Matt Damon. That's who I'm dating.
But on balance, a performer wants to feel that there's something there which stands out because you put a lot of effort into it, a lot of energy and a lot of yourself into something. I feel pretty successful about some movies I've been in that have not been greeted with a lot of enthusiasm and I do trust my own criteria.
The best cure for a hangover is something one straight man can't do for another straight man.