Superman to the rescue

'DON'T take this personally," says Ben Affleck. "But I wish that in this day and age journalists had the threat of getting their knees broken. I hope that doesn't offend."

Eventually, he smiles and tells me: "I'm kidding." But the smile disappears a little too quickly to be entirely reassuring. Something makes me wonder whether Ben Affleck doesn't like interviews.

"I would count this as a walk-the-plank phenomenon," says the 34-year-old. "You do a movie now, and the idea is - you took the money so walk the plank. Go out there and talk to the people. Sit there across from the writers, who say..." - and he switches to an affected English sneer - "'I saw your film'."

It's a pity he feels so bad about conversations like this because he's rather good at them - articulate, funny and candid. But he's clearly also fed up with being the punchline to our best Hollywood jokes. To be fair though, others have joined in the mickey-taking - he was even name-checked by a Team America: World Police song, in the line: "I need you like Ben Affleck needs acting school."

After Hollywoodland, however, he hopes we will find a new kicking boy. In his first film in two years, Affleck plays George Reeves, a smart, ironic, lantern-jawed actor who soared from obscurity to be TV's first Superman but found that celebrity could be as deadly as kryptonite. Affleck can relate to that, tapping into his own career frustrations and ambivalent relationship with fame to illuminate the role of Reeves. "Except that modern typecasting isn't about, 'I think of you as the captain from Star Trek, therefore I can't watch you in X-Men'," he qualifies. "Now it's, 'I think of you as yourself, therefore I can't watch you in a fictional story.'"

This is Affleck's first round of interviews since he retreated after the 'Bennifer' craze, the period during which his engagement and subsequent break-up with Jennifer Lopez was under near-constant tabloid scrutiny. By the time he checked in to rehab for alcohol abuse he had replaced Demi Moore as a byword for bad movie choices, and Colin Farrell was taking notes. His last film, Surviving Christmas, barely survived its own opening week, while Gigli and Jersey Girl were so widely reviled that the latter's publicist leaked the news that Lopez's character dies in the first 15 minutes as a positive selling point for the movie.

EVEN NOW, PUTTING "Ben Affleck" and "Oscar" in the same sentence causes the same sort of jolt as "open-heart surgery" and "office stapler" because he seems to have shifted so far from the moment when he shared an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

It was 1998, and Affleck was just 26, but already apparently Hollywood streetwise. He wrote the film with his childhood friend Matt Damon, and the two of them held out against the robust Harvey Weinstein for a deal that allocated Damon the lead role, while the younger Affleck took the smaller part of best friend Chuckie. Their agreement displayed a certain precocious savviness.

"I'd had a few supporting parts in movies before that but Matt had had two leading parts, in School Ties and Geronimo," says Affleck. "So we felt it would be more palatable to people if Matt played Will and I would get to play a slightly more outrageous and interesting part in the role of Chuckie."

These were his Butch-and-Sundance years: the 1998 Oscar, the fashion shoots, the interest in what films he would make, and whether he was still with Gwyneth or buying rocks for J-Lo. But Affleck's choices became more wayward. He seemed happy in smaller roles in Chasing Amy, Boiler Room and Shakespeare in Love.

However, when it came to picking his blockbuster films, he appeared to use a blindfold and a pin. While Damon chose the breezy glamour of Ocean's 11, Affleck was up to his neck in the hectic bombast of Armageddon and Pearl Harbor. And in the same year that Damon found fresh acclaim in The Bourne Identity, Affleck opted to replace Harrison Ford as superspy Jack Ryan in the widely-panned Sum Of All Fears.

"I started out wanting to be an artist and to do stuff that was beautiful, and that I was really proud of," he admits now. "I think I kind of got cynical and decided I was going to carve out a niche for myself, set a period of time aside and just say, 'Screw it.' And make money and have this and do that."

Curiously, Damon and Affleck seemed destined to live in parallel - they even became first-time fathers within a year of each other. Yet the gap between the two actors - Damon lives on the east coast, Affleck lives with actress wife Jennifer Garner and their daughter Violet in LA - now seems huge in every sense.

However, in Hollywoodland, Affleck's reduced star status adds poignancy to his performance as Reeves. Paradoxes and ironies abound, not least in the scenes in which Affleck's Reeves dons the sweltering woolly Superman suit. For all his easygoing charm, this Reeves feels life owes him more than a silly outfit. At one point, when the Superman Returns project was doing the rounds, Affleck was also considered as a possible Man of Steel, although he claims he had already ruled himself out by playing the red Lycra-clad comic hero, Daredevil. "One of the nice things about playing a superhero is that you are not asked to play any more superheroes," he observes dryly. "I had kind of inoculated myself. Daredevil did pretty well, although it depends on how you define that. It made $100 million. Is it my favourite movie? No.

"But one of the benefits of Daredevil was that it definitely allowed me to identify with George Reeves's dread of, and feelings of absurdity about, putting on a really cumbersome child's costume and pretending to go out and fight crime. He loathed the suit. It was a constant reminder of his thwarted ambition and his own self-loathing. He hadn't achieved being a serious actor; quite the opposite, he'd become a silly actor. And the suit was very uncomfortable. They hadn't designed the fake muscles to look good yet, and the lights were 10 times hotter because of technical reasons back then and so it was a sort of continuing humiliation for him. In fact, as the series went on and he got more control, the amount of Superman in each episode would diminish.

"One of the things I channelled was that experience I'd had of wearing a big red leather thing on my upper torso with a mask I couldn't see through and an outfit that completely inhibited movement. It can feel really humiliating."

Yet while Reeves saw Superman killing off his other opportunities, Affleck's career seems set to be revived by Hollywoodland. He might not yet be in a position to give De Niro sleepless nights, but the role suits him and it's a committed performance.

"I wanted to play him as authentically as possible," says Affleck, who wore a prosthetic nose, bulked up 20lbs and adopted the snappier theatrical elocution of the time for the role. "I checked out all 104 episodes of the television show, among other things. I knew that if I screwed this up, I would have no excuse."

Affleck plays it big and wry, giving Reeves a square-jawed stolidness with moments of heartbreaking frustration and bewilderment. Especially good is a scene in which a slightly drunk Reeves is approached by a young fan who has a real handgun and wants to see if the bullets will bounce off him. It's a sequence full of tension and sly foreshadowing that requires Affleck to abandon his slightly satirical style and dig a little deeper.

The Venice Film Festival gave him the award for best actor, a prize so unexpected that he had already gone home when the ceremony took place, assuming he wouldn't be needed.

In Affleck's eyes, he now has a second chance, while Reeves was never so lucky. "I got to a point where just being out there in magazines got very frantic and unpleasant. I felt as if I was an actor on a soap opera that I had no control over. I'd just look at the paper every day to find out what I did in this week's episode.

"So I did this movie and I directed a movie, and other than that, I just took a kind of a breather in the hope that my life would sort of slow down a little bit. I'm pretty happy now just where I am, and I've come to the understanding of how lucky I am. And that's nice."

Hollywoodland is released November 24

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