Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck is an actor, born 1972.

Ben Affleck started as a child actor on the PBS educational series The Voyage of the Mimi (1984 to 1988), turned up as the bully in Dazed and Confused (1993), and worked through a run of Kevin Smith comedies including Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma. Good Will Hunting (1997) brought him the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay and immediate stardom, which he spent on Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Daredevil until the public got tired of him.

Directing rescued the career, and it turned out to be his best skill. Gone Baby Gone (2007), The Town (2010) and Argo (2012) are all confident, unfashionably classical films: clear geography, patient staging, camera at eye level, actors trusted to carry scenes. Argo won the Academy Award for Best Picture and he took the BAFTA Award for Best Direction. His accolades now include two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and three Golden Globes.

As a performer he is limited in a way that becomes an asset in the right part. He is heavy, guarded and slightly opaque, so he is superb as men managing something they cannot say. Nick Dunne in Gone Girl weaponises his own public likeability. Doug MacRay in The Town is a criminal with no vocabulary for what he wants. Jack Cunningham in The Way Back is barely a performance at all in the showy sense, and it is his best acting. Put him in a part that requires transparency, as Daredevil and Batman largely did, and the same opacity reads as absence.

TV (13)

Where to start with Ben Affleck

Watch The Town first. It is the cleanest demonstration of both jobs at once, a tight Boston heist film he directed and stars in, with a great supporting cast and one of the best getaway sequences of its decade.

Then Argo for the Best Picture winner and Gone Baby Gone for the debut, which is the bleakest and arguably the most interesting of the three, and which he directed without appearing in.

On the acting side, Gone Girl is the sharpest use anyone has made of his screen persona, and The Way Back is the most exposed and least mannered thing he has done. Good Will Hunting shows the writer before the director existed. Air is the late-period comfort watch, a briskly enjoyable film about a shoe deal, and The Last Duel is the one where he is visibly enjoying playing a repellent man.

The films he directed

Four good films and one that does not work. Gone Baby Gone is the debut and is bleaker than anything he had appeared in. The Town is the best of them. Argo won Best Picture and he was not nominated for directing it, which became its own story.

The performances

Affleck is best when a film uses what the audience already thinks about him, which is exactly what Gone Girl does. Dazed and Confused is the early one where he is entirely convincing as somebody unpleasant.

The studio years

The stretch when he was sold as a leading man in films that mostly did not deserve one. Armageddon is the enjoyable one. He has since been considerably funnier about this period than his critics ever were.

Genres Ben Affleck works in

More about Ben Affleck

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