Are ‘The Accountant’ movies Ben Affleck’s chance to redo ‘Good Will Hunting’ as an action thriller?
Good Will Hunting is a great film, isn’t it? It introduced audiences to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, two of our favourite movie stars of the last three decades. It gave Robin Williams one of the most poignant roles of his career. That scene where he wistfully reminisces about his late wife farting in bed? Heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time. The “How do you like them apples?” scene? Classic. The sequence in which Will and his long-suffering best pal Chuckie use their street smarts to evade the National Security Agency spooks trying to recruit Will into being an intelligence agent? Thrilling.
Only, wait… there was no scene in Good Will Hunting where the NSA chased Will and his friends through the rough and tumble alleyways of Boston. There was a memorable moment when a nonplussed Will sends Chuckie to an NSA job interview to turn down their job offer in a customarily foul-mouthed way, but an action scene? That definitely never happened.
Interestingly, though, there truly was almost a thriller subplot in Good Will Hunting. When they completed their first draft of their Oscar-winning screenplay, Damon and Affleck hadn’t written a stirring coming-of-age drama about a troubled genius being discovered in the most unlikely of places. They’d written an action-comedy about a genius janitor who is targeted for relentless, heavy-handed recruitment by the NSA, who want him to become an intelligence asset.
“We came up with this idea of the brilliant kid and his townie friends, where he was special and the government wanted to get their mitts on him,” Affleck told Boston magazine in 2013. “And it had a very Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run sensibility, where the kids from Boston were giving the NSA the slip all the time. We would improvise and drink like six or twelve beers or whatever, and record it with a tape recorder.”
While the idea of Good Will Hunting as an action movie of any description sounds utterly bizarre because we all know the final form it took, it was actually this version of the script that piqued Hollywood’s interest. It was only when Rob Reiner’s Castle Rock Entertainment bought the screenplay that the famed Misery director sat the two young actors down and told them the thriller aspect of the story needed to be jettisoned.
“Look, you have two movies in this script, and the movies are fighting each other,” Reiner reportedly said. “There’s the thriller aspect of the kids from Southie thwarting the big government agency, and then there’s this really awesome character story about this math genius and his relationship with this shrink. And we don’t think those two can live together.”
Damon and Affleck were desperate to get their movie made, so they accepted Reiner’s advice and took a scalpel to their script, removing all the action thriller aspects. When it was reworked, it took shape as the movie that won two Academy Awards and launched their Hollywood careers.
Fast-forward to 2016, and Affleck starred in an action thriller that proved to be a sleeper hit at the box office. In fact, it did so unexpectedly well, and then sustained an audience on DVD and streaming for the better part of the next decade, that a sequel followed in 2025.
In The Accountant and the imaginatively titled The Accountant 2, Affleck plays Christian Wolff, a seemingly mild-mannered, genius-level accountant who secretly makes his living uncooking the books for international criminal organisations. He’s also a savant-like super assassin, too, and when one of his villainous clients sends hitmen to kill him, he takes them out with precision brutality and a whole lot of guns.
When the first Accountant came out, much of the discourse surrounding the movie was about Affleck’s portrayal of a man with autism who was also a lethal killing machine. Then, when the second movie came out, that consternation seemed to have been replaced with a general feeling of, “Wait, The Accountant was popular enough to get a sequel nine years later? And that sequel is pretty good?!” However, as the second film washed over me and I was reminded of Wolff’s backstory, it suddenly hit me: The Accountant is Affleck’s do-over for the lost thriller version of Good Will Hunting.
It’s not hard to imagine Affleck reading the first Accountant script, written by Ozark’s Bill Dubuque, and getting some Good Will Hunting tingles in the back of his brain. After all, Wolff’s past as an autistic child whose intellect baffles everyone close to him isn’t unlike Hunting’s life as a janitor whose intellect separates him from everyone he loves.
There is also a crossroads in Wolff’s past where his mother pushed to send him to a treatment centre to help him learn how to use his intellect to thrive, whereas his father, who works in military PsyOps, insists on training him in guns and martial arts instead. Is this a million miles away from Hunting being encouraged by his therapist to make the most of his smarts, and in the original script, the NSA deciding to use those smarts to their advantage, whether he likes it or not?
When it’s all said and done, there are obviously differences between the thriller Good Will Hunting could have been and the action movie The Accountant is. It’s by no means a one-to-one comparison. But it’s fun to think that Affleck saw something in Christian Wolff that reminded him of Will Hunting in some way, and that encouraged him to play the character.
