Why Ben Affleck refused to believe his dad was friends with Dustin Hoffman: “He’s bullshitting”
It seems to be getting more and more common that famous actors are coming from a place of privilege. Whether they are the children of existing stars or have a relative in a position of power or wealth, many up-and-coming names received massive boosts to get to where they are today. To be fair, this trend has always existed in some form or other, with a few notable exceptions. Take Ben Affleck, for example.
The poster boy for Massachusetts was raised in an artistic household but not a privileged one. His mother, Chris, went to Harvard but worked as an elementary school teacher. Then there’s his father, Tim, an aspiring playwright who worked a number of different jobs to support his artistic endeavours. Sadly, the more senior Affleck never got his big break, which eventually resulted in him living in a rehab facility for over a decade in an attempt to overcome his severe alcoholism.
“My father was a bartender. And growing up, I would meet him at the bar,” Affleck told the Wall Street Journal. “My dad didn’t go to college, but he was well-read, and his ambition was to be a writer, although he never found professional success. He was hindered by his alcoholism. In some ways, we can be our own worst enemies. He was a reverse-class snob. He held a disdain for wealthy people, which stemmed from his own insecurity about not being wealthy and not being educated formally and a desire to prove himself. Which I found that later in life, I subconsciously shared.”
Another job Tim Affleck had was working for the famous Theater Company of Boston (TCB). Though only around for 12 years, the company welcomed famous faces through its doors, including Stockard Channing, Blythe Danner, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, and Ben’s future Gigli co-star Al Pacino. Tim was an actor and stage manager with the group, during which time he formed a friendship with another future great. Alas, his son simply didn’t believe that this could be true.
“When I was a boy, my father would tell stories about being an assistant director at the Theater Company of Boston and about him and ‘Dusty’,” Affleck recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘This is tragic, he’s bullshitting.’ He’s building this horrible fantasy about having had movie star friends. And I internalised a kind of shame that you carry when you feel ashamed of your dad. I carried it for a long time until I was 25, and I went to the Oscars. That night, Dustin Hoffman came up to me and said, ‘Is your father named Tim?’ I said yes. He said, ‘Your father and I lived together.’ And I had this massive sense of embarrassment that I had misjudged my father.”
Hoffman appeared in a number of plays for TCB in the 1960s, including Bertolt Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. This was only a few years before his breakout role in the eternally popular Mike Nichols film The Graduate, which set him on the road to superstardom.
Even if the rest of his father’s tall tales were all false, the fact that Affleck got to prove that at least one of them was real must have meant a great deal in erasing some of the shame he felt towards his dear old dad.
