PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: BEN AFFLECK --.a candid conversation with the hot young star about why women love actors, the perils of viagra, the truth about gwyneth and what he really thinks about matt damon.(Interview)
Ben Affleck, in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, drives his pale blue 1970 Chevy Malibu convertible, a boat of a car, into a parking space on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. He puts a couple of quarters into the meter and, while turning a few heads, walks into a restaurant called Red. He apologizes profusely for being late, even though it's only 15 minutes. "I'm not one of those asshole actors who gets off on being late," he says. Affleck orders iced tea. He's a little embarrassed when the manager recognizes him and suggests moving from a table by the window to a more comfortable-and discreet-booth. The handsome 27-year-old millionaire whose life, it would seem, is now the stuff of male fantasy is still surprisingly modest, unguarded and at times wildly indiscreet.
Affleck smokes, drinks, works out, laughs a lot and clearly has a good time. Only a few years ago, as a struggling actor, he slept on sofas in friends' apartments in Hollywood. Now, thanks to such hits as Good Will Hunting and Armageddon, he's in the midst of renovating a six-bedroom 8000-square-foot Spanish-style villa in the Hollywood Hills, replete with fountains and pool. It cost him about $1.7 million. He also has a comfortable Tribeca loft in New York with an array of vintage video game machines.
Affleck earns about $6 million for a studio film now, and his appeal rests not only on his good looks and screen charm but also on his all-American boyishness and comedic talent. "Ben's the real thing," Jerry Bruckheimer, Armageddon's producer, told Details. "He's got that square jaw, that real Americana look, without being pretty. Women want to be with him and men want to be like him-which is what movie stars are made of."
The veteran director John Frankenheimer, whose thriller Reindeer Games is set to be released this month, chose Affleck for the lead role as an ex- con who becomes involved in a plot to rob a casino. "I needed a vulnerable actor, a strong, masculine actor and a very good actor," said Frankenheimer in the Los Angeles Times. "Ben is all those things."
Another film with Affleck will be released in December. In Daddy and Them, a comedy directed by and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Affleck plays an attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, who, with his lawyer wife (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), becomes entangled with an eccentric Southern family.
Affleck, who shares an Academy Award for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting with his friend Matt Damon (the two also starred in the film), is one of the busiest actors in town. His recent films include Kevin Smith's controversial religious satire Dogma (which reteams Affleck with Damon), as well as a romantic drama, Bounce, opposite ex-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow, with whom he still has a friendly, if complicated, relationship. Affleck and Damon are also writing at least two projects and, through their company, Pearl Street Productions, are producing their first film, The Third Wheel, a comedy in which the two actors have supporting roles.
Affleck likes to say that he was once a gangly and awkward teenager who was shunned by girls. But now his name appears frequently in gossip columns and tabloids as a man-about-town. "I've been linked to Pamela
Anderson, Calista Flockhart-and Matt Damon," he joked to the Detroit News. But a longtime friend, French Stewart, who stars on the television series Third Rock From the Sun, told Details last year that women fall all over themselves when they meet Ben. "If they get within 50 feet of him, their pants will fly right off their bodies." Affleck cringes and laughs at the comment.
Benjamin Geza Affleck (Geza is the name of a Hungarian family friend) was born on August 15, 1972 in Berkeley, California. One year later the family relocated to a middle-class neighborhood in Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts. His mother, Chris, with whom Affleck is very close, is a schoolteacher. His father, Tim, worked with the prestigious Theater Company of Boston (which featured Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall and James Woods). He also worked at a series of blue-collar jobs including bartender and as a janitor at Harvard (the basis for Matt Damon's role in Good Will Hunting).
Affleck says his father was an alcoholic, which led to the divorce of his parents when he was about 11. As the older of two kids (his brother, Casey, is also an actor), Ben remembers often playing the role of peacemaker. Tim Affleck became sober around 1990 and works at a recovery center for drug and alcohol abuse in Indio, California. Affleck says he speaks to his father periodically and has a good relationship with him.
At Cambridge, Ben grew up two blocks from Matt Damon, and the two were childhood friends. They played Little League together and were both students at the Cambridge Ridge and Latin School, where they took drama courses.
At the age of eight, Affleck got his first big break on the PBS television series The Voyage of the Mimi and then landed small parts in television series and commercials. His mother wasn't enthusiastic about her son's involvement in acting, partly because it seemed frivolous. She put the money he earned in a college trust fund. Yet Ben persisted.
After graduating from high school, Ben spent a semester at the University of Vermont in 1990, later switching to Occidental College in California in an effort to keep his mother happy. But Affleck dropped out of college and lived in a grungy Hollywood apartment. In 1992 he was cast together with Damon as anti-Semitic students in the drama School Ties, about a Waspy prep school in New England.
In 1993 he had a small role in the NBC series Against the Grain and landed his first significant part, in the Seventies retro movie Dazed and Confused. It didn't help his career.
"After that film, I was probably the poorest I ever was," Affleck told Premiere. Moreover, he was told by producers and studio executives that the baby fat on his face and his height (6'3") made him an improbable leading man.
But to Affleck's delight, he secured a lead role in Mark Pellington's Going All the Way. The sweet-natured film failed, but it was one of the few times Affleck hadn't played a bad guy.
In another failed film, Kevin Smith's Mallrats, Affleck played a store manager. Smith wrote his next film, Chasing Amy, with Ben in mind for the lead role. The independent 1997 comedy-drama, in which Affleck plays a cartoonist who falls in love with a lesbian, was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival. Producers and studio executives took a second look at him.
Affleck owes a great deal to Smith. It was Smith who took the screenplay for Good Will Hunting to Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, who salvaged the project and purchased it for $1 million from Castle Rock. (Castle Rock owned the movie but clashed with Affleck and Damon over who should direct it and where it should be filmed.)
The 1997 film, directed by Gus Van Sant, was a sensation. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, and Oscars were given to Affleck and Damon for their screenplay and to Robin Williams for best supporting actor. Affleck and Damon became instant celebrities as well as stars.
Affleck, regarded for several years as an indie actor, was then offered a top role in the megabudget action film Armageddon. At the request of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay, Affleck had his teeth capped and buffed himself up to play a wildcat oil driller who falls in love with Bruce Willis' on-screen daughter, Liv Tyler, even as Ben, Bruce and several other tough guys save the world from a fiery collision with an asteroid. He earned $600,000 for the part.
"I just thought, I'm set for life," he told Premiere last year. "Gone fishing. I've got my 600 bones, and I won't have to do any more shitty movies that I don't want to do."
Affleck followed that film with Shakespeare in Love, 200 Cigarettes and a comedy, Forces of Nature.
We asked New York Times entertainment reporter Bernard Weinraub (who previously interviewed Clint Eastwood for PLAYBOY) to meet with Affleck. …
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