IT'S A FUNNY BUSINESS, BEING FAMOUS



Details, April 2002, by David Hochman

In three months, Ben Affleck will say hello to his thirties. After the toughest year of his life, he's ready to turn aging into an art. Four hours and five freeways with the most ambivilant actor in America.

     IT'S A FUNNY BUSINESS, BEING FAMOUS. PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW THINGS ABOUT YOU. Whose sneakers do you wear? Which cereal do you prefer? What vices will ultimately lead to your downfall? And yet, if you reveal some truth about yourself- something that hints at vulnerability or weakness- there's a good chance those same, curious souls who once seemed to care will suddenly be out for blood. If you're reading this article, chances are you're part of the equation.

     Ben Affleck did not do anything wrong. He came prepared to talk about his new movie, Changing Lanes, in which he plays a contemptible lawyer on the mend opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Toni Collette. It is a fine film full of muscular performances, the sort of noirish thriller you'd enjoy on an airplane. But instead, over the course of nearly four hours, and with little prompting, Affleck used his first interview since getting out of rehab last September to talk about that most treacherous of subjects: how he really feels.

     Affleck is a good guy-articulate, warm, unpretentious, and considerate (almost) to a fault. He insisted on picking up his interrogator at home and immediately freed the pink elephant from its cage. "We can go to a bar if you want," he said, maneuvering his shimmering Mercedes sedan through the misty Santa Monica dusk. "You shouldn't feel uncomfortable about that." If it weren't for the fact that the guy makes $12 million a movie and has Harvey Weinstein on his speed-dial, you just might be friends with him. In fact, with all that Affleck's got going for him, you might want to trade places. You would assume he's happy, perhaps even ecstatic about his life. You would be wrong.

     "I don't want to sit here and pretend that everything's great, that I'm some sort of enlightened person," he says after settling on a destination, the new hipster haven Abbott Kinney Boulevard, in the gentrifying outskirts of Venice. "I have a lot of struggles, I'm conflicted, I think about things, I wake up in the middle of the night, I have regrets, I'm very insecure. So it's not like I'm living in some great tranquil state out in my rock garden."

     On the eve of turning 30, at the tail end of perhaps the most difficult year of his life, Affleck is struggling to figure things out. Last summer, his polymorphously hyped Pearl Harbor took nearly as many hits as the USS Arizona; one critic called it "Tora Tora terrible." Affleck was disappointed. "I had all manner of ambitions to do a classic epic 1940s war movie," he says. "I thought the movie would do well and keep me around for a little while, but there was such a visceral attack vibe. I was sort of stunned."

     Not long after, he found himself on a no-limits gambling spree in Vegas, where, between cocktails at the Hard Rock Casino, he won more than $500,000, tipping the waitresses and blackjack dealers a big-time total of $100,000 along the way. "When I first knew Ben, he was just a little Boston homeboy," jokes Robin Williams, Affleck's co-star from Good Will Hunting. "Now he's like a member of the Gratuity Hall of Fame."

     Before his luck ran completely out, Affleck decided to check himself into Promises, the rehab center to the stars in Malibu, where guests pay $33,850 a month to offload their monkeys. When word leaked to the media, Affleck only felt worse. "I was so naive," he says. "I thought I could go someplace- Camp fucking Snoopy or whatever- and have every asset available to me and spend 30 days getting my act together. I thought it was going to be a private thing. Wrong!"

     Of course, we are used to such tales of woe, perhaps even inured to them. We inhabit a Behind the Music world in which countless Oprahs are primed to receive our on-air confessions. Or, as Affleck puts it, "you're just a bad night away from a big E! True Hollywood Story." And many people who hear about his troubles have little sympathy. Some might even be pleased, in that Schadenfreude kind of way, by his unfortunate turn of events. It is one thing to be a rich and handsome celebrity. It is another to be a rich and handsome celebrity who complains.

     Not that the world treats him too badly. At Lilly's, a rowdy bistro on Abbott Kinney, the owner bows and grovels even though Affleck does not have a reservation on this busy night. A prime table appears, pronto, and soon enough, people start wandering over. One attractive young woman just wants to stand there a minute, until, almost as an afterthought, she asks to bum a cigarette. Another woman approaches and breathlessly says, "I need you to have this," then hands him an erotic black-and-white art photograph and is gone. Apparently, she needs hire to attend a nude-photo exhibit in the yoga center upstairs.

     "Some people like being the focus of attention," Affleck says, nursing one of his many smokes of the night. He alternates between cigarettes and Diet Cokes. "But I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with it, mostly because I don't like negative attention." It's true that sometimes his admirers can be harsh. "I was on the subway in New York and somebody comes up to me and says, Bounce, right?"' referring to the 2000 romance co-starring Affleck's former girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. "I said, `Yeah, yeah, that's me.' And this guy says, `That motherfucka was s-s-slow.' I started apologizing to him. What was I supposed to say? `You want your eight bucks back?"'

     Affleck laughs, but he knows there are trade-offs in Hollywood. He's not sure it's a deal he likes. "I've become kind of ambivalent about whether this life I'm living is the one I want to live my whole life," he says quite earnestly. "I need to see if the exchanges are worth it for me or whether I should segue into writing or directing stuff. Travel more. Not live the life of a famous movie actor."

     Yet even as Affleck opens up, even as he breaks the traditional bounds of the interview process and downshifts into the realm of actual human emotion, it's hard to know how serious he is about all this. For one thing, he's not exactly shuffling off to the Old Actors' Home anytime soon. He currently has a handful of projects tied to his name. In addition to Changing Lanes, he will appear in Sum of All Fears, taking over for Harrison Ford in the Tom Clancy-created role of Jack Ryan, a part rife with sequel possibilities. Behind the camera, he's executive co-producing (with longtime friends Matt Damon and Chris Moore) HBO's Project Greenlight, an inside-the-industry reality show that follows a low-budget script from pitch meeting to gala premiere. And he is putting the final touches on Gigli a comedy in which he plays a hit man who kidnaps the mentally challenged brother of a powerful D.A. It co-stars Jennifer Lopez.

     "The thing about Ben," Robin Williams says, "is that he can fight off comets in one movie, then do something quieter. Obviously the giant stuff brings in the moolah, but he can act, too."

     He can also don a codpiece. Affleck says his next project is Daredevil, based on the Marvel Comics series about a blind attorney who develops superhuman senses after being exposed to radioactivity. It's a role that was reportedly rejected by, among others, Brad Pitt and Guy Pearce-disconcerted, perhaps, by the protagonist's red unitard. But Affleck is gung ho. "For whatever reason," he says, spearing a fava bean, "when I was a kid, this comic was my idea of sexy and romantic and dangerous. If I'm ever gonna wear tights, this is the one to do it in."

     In fact, if all goes according to plan, Daredevil will be part of Affleck's glorious third act. He has it all figured out. Act I had him and Damon winning the Oscars. Paltrow was falling in love with him, teen magazines were begging him to take off his shirt. Act II saw the correction, the flop phase, thanks to films like Forces o f Nature and Reindeer Games, which bottomed out with last summer's Hawaiian thud (though the latter still managed to earn half a billion dollars worldwide, thank you very much). Now comes Act III, the moment when the stars align and all comes together. "It's like the public says, `We've beaten up on you enough,"' he says. "Ultimately there's a phase where it's like, `You've survived, and now we'll let you stay around."'

     A waiter appears. Or actually, reappears. He's been hovering all night, doing an admirable job topping off the bottled water and soft drinks. "May I ask, is everything okay?" he says.

     Affleck doesn't miss a beat. "More or less," he says, "I mean, I'm still working some things out, but basically, I'm fine."


     AFFLECK CRIED WHEN HE READ THE SCRIPT FOR CHANGING LANES. HE WAS ALMOST finished on Pearl Harbor and in "a really dark place." Actually, he was in Corpus Christi, Texas, aboard an aircraft carrier in dry dock-"as if that didn't have enough fucking symbolic relevance," he says with a laugh. "It was 110 degrees, I hadn't said a line of dialogue in a week, and everybody was at their wit's end, especially me."

     Enter the character of Gavin Banek, a pushy young Manhattan lawyer who leaves the scene of an accident after his Mercedes sideswipes a working man's jalopy. Suffice it to say, road rage ensues.

     "I finished the script and felt like I was that guy," Affleck says. "Miserable and corrupt and compromised in a lot of ways. I wasn't happy with my life, and felt as if the pressures had become like a creeping vine. One moment you wake up and there's a stranglehold on you."

     The house was the first thing to go. The $1.6 million spread off Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills became a symbol of Affleck's mounting angst. "I wasn't happy there," he says. "It was really huge and it turned into this big social place." He ended up renting it to director Kevin Smith, who'd given Affleck an early break in the films Mallrats and Chasing Amy. "Kevin has a family," Affleck says, now living alone in a rented house until he finds a new home. "I would have just filled it up with friends."

     Alcohol had become a problem, to be sure, but not in the way people might expect. He saw drinking as part of a pattern of behavior that was "infantile and obnoxious," driven by insecurity and competitiveness (he calls it "alphamonkey behavior"), and fueled by a craving for cutting other people down. "I thought I was going to make myself feel better by tearing everybody else apart," he says. Watching himself on Project Greenlight, in which he appears arrogant and cocky at times, Affleck says he felt "mortified."

     Getting sober helped immediately. As his producing partner Chris Moore says, "Ben's easier to find, more attentive, more alert. It wasn't just that he drank too much, but that he would be out all night. Now he's really here."

     Which happens to be Affleck's exact intention: "Drinking wasn't making anything better," he says. "It was just a distraction, and I didn't want to be distracted. There's something to be said for having discipline with yourself and saying no." Still, he's quick to add, "I'm not a role model in this regard. I don't want to be. I don't have any fucking solutions to anything."


     AFFLECK CRINGES A LITTLE WHEN THE OWNER MAKES HIS FAREWELL FUSS, PROMPTING A table of admirers to break into applause. Outside on Abbott Kinney, there's a line of civilians waiting for the valet, but the car guy heads straight to Affleck. "No, please," he says, "there were other people waiting." Still, his Mercedes arrives before anyone else's.

     Affleck, meanwhile, is already in rewind mode, revisiting the things he let slip over dinner. "This is the kind of interview where I feel like everything was a complete disaster," he says sheepishly. "I'm thinking, How can I try to salvage this?"

     Almost by reflex, he drives toward the ocean, to 29th Avenue, the dimly lit one-way alley in Venice where he and Damon and two other roommates lived, lo some eleven years ago, when they moved to L.A. The second-floor apartment looks every bit as shabby as it did back then, he says, but he smiles nonetheless. There are no cars, and Affleck idles in the middle of the street. "In some ways I was never happier," he says after a moment. "Back then it was only possibility. Things could only work out."

     A few minutes later, he's on the freeway, tracing a giant loop from the 10 to the 405 to the 110 to the 405 and back again to the 10. As L.A. in all its garish nighttime glory flashes by, the reels of Affleck's mind never stop spinning. "I feel like I'm getting it together, and that's encouraging," he says eventually, "but it opens up a lot more questions that I never even asked before-and as a consequence it's worrisome. It's worrisome that I'll let other people down. That I'll let myself down."

     Such a fall seems increasingly unlikely. Affleck and Damon-along with Affleck's little brother, Casey-have started writing again. This time, it's a story called "Lay Down Easy," set in blue-collar Revere, Massachusetts, and centered around two brothers, one of whom races his dog at the Wonderland racetrack. He's even thinking about getting back to dating, too, though he's okay with being single right now.

     A few days later, Affleck sends me an e-mail in response to a quick follow-up question: What good things are you hoping will come from the years ahead?

     He goes on for pages, as is his style, but the essence is this: "I know that challenge lies in wait for me in the tall grass of my thirties and I am beginning- really just beginning- to feel ready to take that on. I think the only real triumph for me would be to look back and be able to call myself a good father, a good husband, and a good man."

     Looks like it could be an interesting third act.