Ben Affleck / A Guys Guy that Women Love



Biography, Feb 2000, BY KITTY BOWE HEARTY

     Ben Affleck is the kind of celebrity you know-even if you think you don't. His boyish, slightly off-kilter face is familiar from starring roles in Armageddon and Forces of Nature, and a small but significant part in Shakespeare in Love. Or you may remember his bursting-at-the-seams exuberance when he and childhood friend Matt Damon accepted an Oscar in 1998 for co-writing Good Will Hunting. Then again, you could recognize him from the many photos taken when he and Gwyneth Paltrow were a hot item.
     In fact, the 27-year-old actor, who appears this month in the thriller Reindeer Games, is fast becoming one of the most successful and versatile actors of the post-Tom Cruise wave. Like Cruise, Harrison Ford, and Mel Gibson, he is the rare star who appeals to both men and women: a guy's guy that females love. "He's the closest thing we have today to a Jimmy Stewart," Reindeer Games director John Frankenheimer told Biography Magazine. "He has a really likeable Everyman quality. You root for Ben Affleck...you want him to succeed. I don't think he'd make a good villain."
     Affleck's star began to ascend three years ago at the Sundance Film Festival. Held every year in Park City, Utah, under the creative directorship of Robert Redford, Sundance has become an intensely watched launching pad for American movies. At the time, Affleck was an experienced but largely unknown actor; he was also the star of Going All the Way, one of 16 films selected for the festival's prestigious Dramatic Competition. Going All the Way was being talked about at the festival even before it screened, which came as a big surprise to Affleck. "Everyone was saying there's really good buzz.... I sort of brushed it off. I was thinking, `How can there be buzz, no one has seen the movie,"' he remembered. "Then I went to that screening. The theater was packed, and there was everybody that you read about ... it was astonishing."
     If anything, Affleck was astonished too soon. He emerged as the prince of that year's festival, based on a pair of performances (the second was as the hero of Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy) that illustrated his acting range. Although neither film was a box-office success, they drew attention to the young actor. By the end of the year, a movie that he and childhood friend Matt Damon had co-written was also receiving a lot of buzz. Good Will Hunting, the story of a troubled math genius who mops floors at M.I.T. for a living, emerged from the pack of late December movies as a favorite with both audiences and critics. The movie, which has earned over $130 million domestically, was nominated for nine Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and won two: Best Supporting Actor for Robin Williams and Best Original Screenplay. Even hardened cynics were touched by the sheer joy of winners Affleck and Damon, whose dates for the ceremony were their moms.

     Affleck was born in Berkeley, California, on August 15, 1972, but while he was still a baby, his parents moved to Massachusetts. They settled in Cambridge, where his brother, Casey (also an actor), was born in 1975, and where he met and became friends with Matt Damon, who lived two blocks away. Affleck's mother, Chris, was a teacher, and his father, Tim, was involved in the local theater community. But theater work wasn't lucrative, and Tim Affleck supported his family by working as a janitor at Harvard (much like the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting) and as a bartender. Ben fell into acting at 8, when a friend of his mother's was looking for a kid to star in the PBS series Voyage of the Mimi. "It sounded like fun to me. I remember going on an audition and thinking I had a pretty good chance to get the role, having no conception of how it works," he recalled with a laugh. "I was like, `Oh you audition and then you do it,' never understanding there might be 500 other kids. So I got the part. Later on I learned that you don't always get what you read for."
     Because the show was shot on location, young Ben traveled a lot. But he credits his mother with keeping him safe from the dangers of child stardom. "My mother was very concerned that I have a normal childhood. I went to school and only worked sporadically. We were never the family that moved to L.A. because the kid was supporting them." Affleck's parents divorced when he was 12. His father, who had a drinking problem, went into rehab and now works as a counselor to recovering alcoholics.
     By the time Affleck was 14, he had decided that he wanted to be an actor. After high school, he briefly attended the University of Vermont, but then dropped out and moved to Los Angeles. As a concession to his mother, he tried to attend Occidental College while pursuing an acting career, but juggling school and auditions got to be too much. "I'm somebody who doesn't like to do something unless I can really commit to it. I could do neither one well. And so I finally left school and pursued (acting) full time." The early years were lean; Affleck lived in a tough Hollywood neighborhood, and he and his roommate once fought over the change they found in the couch to buy a $1.29 chicken-dinner special.
     In 1992, he made his film debut in School Ties, a strained prep-school drama about anti-Semitism that was remarkable primarily for its ensemble of young actors including Chris O'Donell, Brendan Fraser, and Matt Damon. The following year, he appeared alongside Parker Posey and Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, a teen comedy. "I was the only unlikable character in a cast full of likable characters, which is not much help when you're looking for jobs," Affleck said. "After that movie, I was probably the poorest I ever was." By the time he made 1995's Mallrats, things seemed to be going from bad to worse. But it was this misbegotten mistake that would turn his life around. Mallrats was an embarrassing failure, but its writer-director Kevin Smith was able to see past Affleck's baby face and envision the makings of a star. "I was like, "Why is Affleck always playing the bully? He is so not that,"' Smith told Premiere magazine. "Around that time I started writing Chasing Amy and I decided to write him a leading-man part." Hello Sundance. Hello Los Angeles. Hello $1.7 million house in the Hollywood Hills.

     If Affleck's life were to follow the typical young-buck-comes-to-Hollywood script, this is where he would hit a wall and flame out, done in by hubris or ego or pressure. But despite a full plate, and a lot more money (the days of cheap chicken are over-he was paid $6 million to appear in Reindeer Games), his sense of self appears to he a constant. "There is no such thing as an overnight success," says Frankenheimer, who first met Affleck in 1994. "For a young man who has had all this fame thrust upon him, he's handling it amazingly well."
     Affleck also is said to be shrewd about the movie business, and the history of Good Will Hunting bears this out. He and Damon never had any doubt their script would make it to the big screen. "I knew it was going to get made," said Damon of their movie. "Ben and I were going to make it no matter what." Their ambitious collaboration continues: Affleck and Damon recently co-produced The Third Wheel, the first film from their production company (Pearl Street Productions). And the friendship continues, as well. Last November, they co-starred in Kevin Smith's Dogma, a controversial comedy in which they play a pair of fallen angels whose banishment lands them in the American Midwest-a fate to which they can relate. "It was easy to fall into playing old buddies who have been kicking around on Earth together for eons, because that's how we feel about each other," Damon explained. "We've been through a lot together; we've had some exciting times and some pretty boring ones, so we can imagine spending eternity in Wisconsin together."
     And then there is the loyalty factor. Affleck's career started to take off while Dogma was in production, but his commitment to the project never wavered. "No matter how much Ben's star rose during the making of Dogma, he never lost his desire to make the film or his belief in it," reported Smith. "Without Ben, I don't think I could have done this movie."
     As for Reindeer Games, its perennially gruff director, Frankenheimer, described it as "not a movie for sissies." As if to prove that, Affleck suffered a grade-three concussion during the filming of a prison fight. It also was proof that there are some things he can't have. "That was the day I realized I had no chance of playing in the NFL," he told Vanity Fair.

     These days, Affleck lives in Los Angeles and New York, where he owns a loft in Tribeca. His loves are cars (he owns two), motorcycles (at last count, the total was five), video games, and amateur photography. He is extremely close to his mother and has called his brother "my best friend." He recently described himself to Playboy as "100% single," though he remains close to Gwyneth Paltrow, his onetime girlfriend, whom he dated from October 1997 to January 1999, and with whom he continues to work (they will appear later this year in Don Roos' Bounce). Work, friends, family, and fun are the parameters of his life, but he still remembers the tough times. "I'm glad I spent enough time out there making a living and being an actor but totally under the radar," he said. "I could see people's careers evolve and how they handled it. It's a valuable thing to watch and I think it prepared me. All of a sudden you are on the cover of magazines and getting all these movies and you're in the position of losing out on things because you don't have enough time.
     "But I also appreciate it. It is a little hectic and crazy, but it's certainly better than sitting around your house, waiting for the phone to ring."