How ‘Buffy’ gave Ben Affleck his most “humiliating” movie moment
Some people think of voice acting as being a fairly non-taxing job. You can look as horrible as you want while standing in front of a mic and voicing the personality of an animated character that will quickly fade into the 21st-century Disney graveyard.
There are some projects that feature voice casts of washed-up actors looking to make a quick buck from voicing another cartoon animal that is no different to the endless stream of almost identical characters to come before them. But there are some with genuinely genius casts of actors who not only voice the characters but bring them to life, bending their voices to add dimension and depth to the non-human characters we fall in love with on the screen.
It could be Tom Hanks’ voicing of Woody from Toy Story, Robin Williams as The Genie or Ayo Edebiri’s voicing of Envy in Inside Out 2, but there are many actors who have done a grand job of playing characters that would be devoid of life without their insurmountable talents.
But this didn’t seem to be the case for Ben Affleck when he took his crack at the whip, with the actor describing his mortifying experience of being booked to voice a single line in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Buffy is one of the most popular teen television shows of all time, with Sarah Michelle Gellar becoming the icon of a generation after fighting various monsters and ghouls with her signature lip gloss and sleek outfits. But while it was a career-defining role for Geller and a breakout opportunity for Pedro Pascal, it didn’t have quite the same impact on Affleck, who later found himself being cut from the project after seemingly fluffing up one simple line.
When explaining this, Affleck said, “The most humiliating thing was in one of my early parts, I got one line. I had just moved out to LA, I got a line in a movie, and I was playing a basketball player.” The scene required him to react in a scared way after being accosted by a vampire during the middle of a game, exclaiming, “Take it, man” in response. He apparently filmed this simple scene many times, describing how the director was “really vigorous” about nailing this small moment.
But much to his dismay, he later found that all of his hard work had been for nothing. He explained, “And then I went and saw the movie with some friends… and I sounded very different. I realised right then that they re-recorded my lines. I was so bad, they needed me to be in the scene, but the director obviously was like, ‘I can’t hear the voice again!’ They had to pay someone to come in and say, ‘Hey man, take it,’ because apparently, I couldn’t say that well-convincingly enough/”
It’s a pretty humiliating thing to happen so early on in your career, and perhaps something that might deter other actors from continuing on their Hollywood journey after falling the simplest of tasks. But luckily for Affleck, he was either unfazed or very resilient to rejection, continuing his hustle until he quickly reached the top of the industry with his Oscar win for Good Will Hunting.
