Affleck promotes his new action film, The Accountant 2, and holds nothing back when thinking back to a couple infamous projects.
Ben Affleck gets back in action for The Accountant 2, which took home the audience award at this year’s SXSW festival. Our own Chris Bumbray enjoyed the old-school-style action throwback of this entry as he said in his review, “Overall, The Accountant 2 works terrifically well as a slam-bang buddy action comedy, with Affleck and Bernthal at their absolute best. […] As a meat-and-potatoes action fan, I’ve been starving for a film like this. I love the sleek 87North-style action flicks that are in favor now, but The Accountant 2 is old-school in a way I’ve been missing. The extra emphasis on characterization only sweetens the pot. Bring on The Accountant 3! “ As Affleck promotes the film, he talks with GQ, where they ask him about his days as Batman and if postmortem thoughts about playing the character.
The Good Will Hunting star replied, “I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two. In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.”
He continues, “But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh sh*t, we have a problem.’ Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”
When Affleck did the DVD commentary for Armageddon, his truthfulness somewhat became viral as he had explained that he questioned director Michael Bay on the logic of drillers learning to be astronauts as opposed to astronauts learning to drill, to which Bay told him to “shut the f*ck up.” Affleck explained, “That is one of the achievements of my career on which I’m willing to pat myself on the back. I believe that may be at least top five all-time DVD commentaries. By the way, nobody said anything to me. I don’t think any of the other people listened to it or gave a fuck until years later when it was played. And I was kind of shocked and appalled that I went on there and started being like…. I mean, that’s all true. Everything I said was a hundred percent true, but that’s the point. You’re not supposed to go on there and tell all of the truth.”
He went on to continue about his time on the sci-fi film, “I never expected, ‘Oh, this is going to be genius.’ I thought, I’m going to go do a big Hollywood action movie and I love it. And yes, during the movie, I was kind of surprised to find that sometimes they weren’t all that interested in making sense. I remember Billy Bob [Thornton] was having a long conversation about a scene in the space mission control or whatever it was, and he was like, ‘No, that’s okay, man. I can stop talking about it. I just kind of like to be in the kind of movies that make sense, you know what I mean? But f*ck it, we don’t have to do that. We’re not doing that on this one. F*ck it.’ And I was the only person who was kind of like, ‘Okay, I guess we don’t operate by those other rules here.’ But there’s a sense of being small and of this thing being big. And so I felt like a little ant on the elephant when I would shoot my mouth off about the conversation I had with Michael [Bay, the director of Armageddon] about why is it easier to train oil drillers to be astronauts than to train astronauts to drill a hole in the ground?”
Originally published at https://www.joblo.com/ben-affleck-batman-armageddon/
