Casey Affleck
Casey Affleck is an actor, born 1975.
Casey Affleck started as a child actor in a PBS television film in 1988 and spent his twenties inside other people's projects: three Gus Van Sant pictures, a supporting role in Good Will Hunting, and Virgil Malloy across all three Ocean's films, a part that mostly required him to bicker. His first lead came in the independent comedy Lonesome Jim in 2006.
Then 2007 changed everything. He was nominated for an Academy Award as Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a performance built entirely out of fandom curdling into resentment, and he carried his brother's Gone Baby Gone in the same year. The voice is the key to him: thin, high, always fractionally behind the beat, so every line sounds like something he decided not to phrase a different way. He plays men who cannot articulate the important thing, and the films work by waiting them out.
Manchester by the Sea won him the Academy Award for Best Actor and is the fullest version of that idea, a study in grief that refuses catharsis. A Ghost Story took the same interest in unspeakable feeling and removed his face from it entirely. He has directed too, including the mockumentary I'm Still Here. The mainstream comedy detours, Tower Heist and American Pie 2 among them, are the least persuasive part of the record.
Movies (46)
- Interstellar (2014)
- Oppenheimer (2023)
- Good Will Hunting (1997)
- Ocean's Eleven (2001)
- American Pie 2 (2001)
- Ocean's Twelve (2004)
- Manchester by the Sea (2016)
- Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
- ParaNorman (2012)
- The Instigators (2024)
- Out of the Furnace (2013)
- Gone Baby Gone (2007)
- Tower Heist (2011)
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
- Triple 9 (2016)
- To Die For (1995)
- Chasing Amy (1997)
- The Finest Hours (2016)
- A Ghost Story (2017)
- Slingshot (2024)
- Unity (2015)
- Light of My Life (2019)
- Light of My Life (2019)
- Our Friend (2019)
- The World to Come (2021)
- Drowning Mona (2000)
- The Killer Inside Me (2010)
- I'm Still Here (2010)
- I'm Still Here (2010)
- The Old Man & the Gun (2018)
Where to start with Casey Affleck
Manchester by the Sea is essential, and it is worth knowing before you press play that the film is slow, cold and completely unwilling to comfort you. It is also the best American lead performance of its decade.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the other major work, and the one to pick if you prefer your sadness with better cinematography. Gone Baby Gone is the most conventional entry point, a solid detective story that gets much harder in its last half hour.
A Ghost Story is the experiment, and depending entirely on your mood it is either the most moving thing on this list or a bedsheet with holes in it. For the light option, Ocean's Eleven and Good Will Hunting show what he was doing before anyone handed him a lead.
The grief performances
The register he is best at and the hardest to sit with: men who have lost something and will not discuss it. Manchester by the Sea is the famous one, but the same withholding runs through most of the films he picks for himself.
The crime films
Detectives, thieves and killers, played at a lower volume than the genre usually wants. He tends to underplay exactly where another actor would push, which makes the Ocean's heists funny and the darker ones genuinely unsettling.
Inside other directors' films
Two decades of showing up in someone else's picture and quietly walking off with a scene. Three films for Gus Van Sant, two for Christopher Nolan, and a habit of taking small parts in very large productions.
When he chose the material himself
The films he directed, produced or built around his own interests, including a hoax documentary that fooled a lot of people for a year. They are uneven and none of them are safe choices, which is roughly the point of them.