How art imitated “humiliating” life in Ben Affleck’s most underrated performance
There’s no denying that Ben Affleck is a supremely talented writer and director and an excellent actor, for that matter, but there’s also no denying that he has spent a fairly sizable amount of his career, for a variety of reasons, in spandex, pretending to be some kind of superhero.
In films like Daredevil, The Justice League and Suicide Squad, Affleck duly donned a mask and tights to jump around doing a growly voice, but always in a slightly overly serious way that rendered the whole thing a bit daft. To be honest, even Christopher Nolan’s excellent Batman films become slightly affected when you think a little harder about the fact that it’s really a bloke with little pointy ears dressed up as a man bat.
However, Affleck did actually do a fine job in one superhero movie, albeit one that is either forgotten about or overlooked entirely, 2006’s Hollywoodland, the tale of actor George Reeves, who played the original Superman in the 1950s TV show Adventures of Superman. Affleck starred opposite Adrien Brody in the film, which fared reasonably well with critics but less so with audiences.
The actor, who gained a fair amount of weight in order to portray Reeves, who died of a gunshot wound at just 45, did get some acclaim for his performance, and told IndieLondon about how the process of ‘suiting up’ was very different to the other, more musclebound examples he’s been involved with over the years: “The approach to it in this movie was just about how humiliating it was. He [Reeves] loathed the suit; it was a constant reminder of his thwarted ambitions and his own self-loathing”.
He also highlighted why that was the case, noting, “The suit was very uncomfortable; they hadn’t designed the fake muscles to look good yet, it was just a wool sweater basically, and the lights were ten times hotter because of technical reasons back then. So it was a sort of continuing humiliation for him.”
Affleck also used his previous work in 2003’s Daredevil as further inspiration for the role, the Marvel comics movie that was generally panned, as he paired up with the likes of Jennifer Garner, Jon Favreau and Colin Farrell to play a blind lawyer turned vigilante. He explained, “One of the things it channelled in me was that experience that I’d had of wearing a big red leather thing on my upper torso with a mask I couldn’t see through and an outfit that completely inhibited movement, feeling humiliated and like a fool. I just recalled that.”
As for whether there’s any chance of getting him back into a batsuit, director Zack Snyder may have lit a few flames under that particular possibility by recently posting a photo to his Instagram of the first time Affleck donned the outfit for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice back in 2016.
He captioned the picture: “A black-and-white 4×5 Polaroid I took of Ben during the costume test—first time in the suit. Everything I hoped it would be”, and fans immediately started wondering whether it was a subtle hint at the director considering stepping behind the camera for more DC comics movies, which he last did with 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, also starring Affleck.
Meanwhile, the actor is busy serving as a producer after the success of his sequel this year to The Accountant, including Strangers, the new film from Seven director David Fincher, and a remake of the 1957 Marlene Dietrich classic courtroom drama Witness for the Prosecution.
