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 got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom's was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
A friend of my mom's was a casting director so, really as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.
I recognize that Hollywood is not about seniority. Often it's not even a meritocracy. It's about what you did yesterday. You have a couple of misses, and suddenly it's impossible to find a hit. So the swings are gigantic. But I've always understood it as such, and navigated it as such.
My father has positional vertigo, and if he flies he gets really dizzy, so he has to drive out to California, which he does a couple times a year. We talk, but we e-mail mostly.
Jackson said, laughing. ''You're both up against a deadline.
I was glad I did, except when I was wandering around in my real life with this big red Afro. I looked like Ronald McDonald.
Nobody I represent is pretending to be the pope or a role model for young people. People have to live their lives. They have the right to smoke if they want.
Anxiety is a kind of fuel that activates the fight-or-flight part of the brain in me. It makes sure that a velociraptor isn't around the corner and that you do as much as you possibly can to survive. Because Hollywood has a lot in common with 'Jurassic Park' and its primeval-dinosaur universe.
What happens is this sort of bleed-over from the tabloids across your movie work. You go to a movie, you only go once. But the tabloids and Internet are everywhere. You can really subsume the public image of somebody.
I started as a child, in this PBS series 'Voyage of the Mimi,' which led to driving down to New York for 'Afterschool Special' auditions, which led to moving to Los Angeles. I wanted to be an actor. But in L.A., I got into film technology, and I was building cheap editing systems and would edit my friend's acting reels.
You can say what you want about me. You can yell at me with a video camera and be TMZ. You can follow me around and take pictures all you want. I don't care.
There's a lot of crazy, weird people out there. It's an ugly world.
People of similar political persuasions tend to flock together.