Affleck bouncing between big, small projects

NEW YORK Just because they're no longer romantically involved doesn't mean they can't make a romantic movie together. So here come Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow, having cycled their way through the tabloids, starring in "Bounce."

In the twist-of-fate film written and directed by Don Roos, she plays a widow and mother who doesn't know that the man romancing her is the same guy who gave her husband his seat on a plane that crashed a year ago. Affleck is the would-be lover sitting on a guilty secret, wondering how to handle it without spoiling the fragile relationship developing between them.

Paltrow plays a grown-up Valley Girl, disclosing not the slightest trace of her Manhattan Upper East Side silk-stocking district upbringing.

Meanwhile, Paltrow and Affleck are playing out an inadvertent little Noel Coward drama. They are sitting maybe 50 feet apart in separate but adjacent suites in a Park Avenue hotel, a mile or so from where Paltrow grew up, doing interviews to publicize their new movie. Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Mass. He and his boyhood pal Matt Damon saw their careers take off simultaneously. Ever since "Good Will Hunting," which won them both Oscars, they have become part of America's Hollywood career jackpot folklore. Since his overnight move from no profile to high profile, Affleck, 28, has warily been dancing the Hollywood tango, alternating blockbusters with smaller films that allow him to stretch more

For every "Armageddon," which hit big, or "Reindeer Games," which didn't, there have been smaller roles in smaller-scale films such as "Dogma," "Boiler Room," and "Shakespeare in Love." While Paltrow won her Oscar for playing the luminous romantic lead in that film, Affleck had fun playing the likable ham actor Shakespeare needed to make his obscure new play, "Romeo and Juliet," more commercial. It is in this smaller, more venturesome group of films that "Bounce" belongs. He says Paltrow frequently has urged him to stretch in his choice of material and that his involvement with "Bounce" began when she sent him the script for it.

"Gwyneth called me up and said, `You know, I've got this script I want to do and I think you'd be great to do it. You should do something, you know, very kind of small in terms of just being about people being in their relationships.' I read it, thought it was well drawn, and that it was really an actor's movie. It offered the chance to do some new kind of textured stuff, multilayered stuff. I really looked at it as an actor's challenge first and foremost."

Meticulously, Affleck extinguishes a cigarette butt by dropping it into an empty Diet Coke bottle on a marble-topped coffee table, and continues: "What I didn't anticipate-and strangely, I hadn't had this since I worked with Matt and with my brother-was that when somebody knows you really well, you can't fake anything, you can't get by with anything. Because where people you've just met might not be able to tell, people who know you really, really well just won't be fooled. If it's not honest, they're not gonna buy it."

These reactions, expressions, bits of body language inevitably inform "Bounce," although, Affleck says, not consciously. "When I see the movie, I don't really see me and Gwyneth in there. I see the characters that Don created. But maybe on a very subconscious level you are able to tap into a memory of intimacy, or a feeling of being scared, or a feeling of warmth. But in terms of specifics, our life is so different from the lives of these characters that there were never any obvious parallels. It really helped on an emotional level. You know, feeling emotionally susceptible and referencing, like, a history, saved me the trouble of doing more homework. I didn't need to research a lot of this."

Shuttling between big commercial projects and smaller, riskier films is essential, as Affeck sees it. He just finished shooting one of next summer's likely blockbusters, "Pearl Harbor," and will succeed Harrison Ford as CIA analyst Jack Ryan in the next Tom Clancy thriller, "The Sum of All Fears." But he also recently wrapped a Billy Bob Thornton comedy alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, "Daddy and Them." He's eyeing "Zoolander" with Owen Wilson. And doing "Bounce" led him to another commercially chancy project, "Changing Lanes," in which he'll work opposite Samuel L. Jackson.