If “bombastic” is your favorite flavor of Ben Affleck performance, here’s some potential bad news: it looks like that flavor might have just been taken off the market.
According to a new conversation with the Oscar-winning, multi-hyphenate filmmaker, Affleck will no longer be appearing in movies like Michael Bay’s Armageddon, and will instead only choose to “do stuff that is personally rewarding” to him. You know, stuff like WB and DC’s upcoming The Flash movie.
In the latest entry in Variety’s Actors on Actors interview series, Affleck spoke with Borat 2 star Sacha Baron Cohen and the topic of how he chooses his next project came up. After acknowledging that he’s no longer the young man he was when he first broke into the industry with the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, Affleck said “there are more interesting roles” floating around out there for him to take on.
“People with whom you can identify are more interesting to me because I no longer have the ability to do something when I’m bored halfway through it and hate it,” he said, pointing out that a project has to be worthwhile enough for him to be away from his kids. “I’m just looking to do stuff that is personally rewarding,” he said later. “I think my Armageddon days are behind me.”
That’s a very specific diss, but it’s not the first time Affleck has dunked on Bay’s goofy mega-spectacle from 1998. He was the key participant on the film’s DVD commentary, in which he torched the logic of the movie’s plan to train oil drillers to be astronauts instead of the other way around:
Ben Affleck should do DVD commentaries more often. What a ledge. pic.twitter.com/gQ3abVpcDu
— écran (@sylvie_ua) June 14, 2016
Affleck has experienced some incredible career highs and lows over the years – as the now-tired joke goes, he literally starred in a movie called Paycheck – and this statement would seem to indicate that he’s going to be more judicious with his choices about what projects to get involved with in front of the camera. He really is going to appear as Batman again in The Flash movie, but he’s also reuniting with Matt Damon for Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and starring opposite his now-ex Ana de Armas in an erotic thriller called Deep Water.
Of course, he’s also staying plenty busy with directing: he’s currently attached to Ghost Army, about a secret force that used illusions to trick the Nazis during WWII; King Leopold’s Ghost, about rebellion in the Congo; a McMillions movie, about that stranger-than-fiction crime story involving the McDonald’s Monopoly game; and The Big Goodbye, about the making of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
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