The awful movie that became a “gift” for Ben Affleck: “Turned out to be the real love of my life”
Not many actors can survive a downturn in fortune. Ben Affleck, however, is one of the most prominent Hollywood stars to have survived the drop and climbed back to the top of the mountain. Whilst some will always have reservations about the scope of the American’s ability, it remains an impressive achievement that he bounced back from an acting career that seemed destined for the deepest depths of streaming sites and reasserted himself as an actor and director of merit.
Affleck started to gain prominence in the early 1990s with hits such as Richard Linklater’s movie Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith’s comedy Mallrats, but it wasn’t until Good Will Hunting that he became considered a serious talent, with his dramatic skill and writing abilities clear to everyone watching on. Affleck then featured in projects such as Armageddon and Shakespeare in Love, which further boosted his status. However, a series of derided movies followed, and his career took a worrying nosedive.
That’s the ugly truth about Hollywood we are so happy to ignore. For every movie that brightens your day and makes you smile or cry or elicits some kind of miracle emotion from you, there are a bunch of movies panned by critics, hundreds that never got out of the script stage and thousands that exist solely in the minds of their creators. Movies are a heaven of sorts, but they can certainly feel like hell if you begin to take a downward turn, as Affleck did.
At the start of the new millennium, Affleck starred in the widely panned Pearl Harbour, The Sum of All Fears, Changing Lanes and, more notoriously, Daredevil. In addition to this, his high-publicised relationship with Jennifer Lopez hit tabloid headlines and coincided with this succession of derided titles. Before things could get better for Affleck, they got worse.
In 2003, he featured as the low-ranking mobster Larry Gigli in the romantic comedy Gigli alongside Lopez. Any hope that it would be a hit due to the prominence of its stars was quickly dashed, with the project talking in just $7million at the box office against an eyewatering budget of $75m. It is now considered one of the worst films of the 2000s.
Affleck would languish in the doldrums for a little longer until he made a comeback in 2006 with his acclaimed performance as Superman icon George Reeves in the noir Hollywoodland. The following year, he made his feature film directorial debut with the critical sensation Gone Baby Gone, and this period in the mire was gradually put behind him. What followed were other directorial hits such as The Town and Argo, as well as celebrated acting turns like Gone Girl and his contentious period as Batman.
Interestingly, Affleck once revealed that he may not have pursued life as a director if it wasn’t for the experience of Gigli. He maintained that this period of failure helped him learn. Ironically, he said that Gigli director Martin Brest – who had previously made Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Meet Joe Black – significantly influenced him, calling him “really gifted”.
“Interestingly, I learned more about directing on that movie than anything else because Marty is a brilliant director, really gifted,” Affleck told Entertainment in 2022.
Affleck also described the failure of Gigli as “a gift”, as, without it, his career might have taken a different direction. “But if the reaction to Gigli hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t have ultimately decided, ‘I don’t really have any other avenue but to direct movies,’ which has turned out to be the real love of my professional life,” Affleck continued. “So, in those ways, it’s a gift”.
To turn your worst moments into inspiration for your best is the kind of motive usually reserved for premier sportspeople. The desire to reframe a failure into a catalyst for success is the driving force behind some of the greatest moments in human history. While Hollywood movies might not be such a serious affair, it is easy to see that Ben Affleck was always likely to keep on succeeding with this mindset.
Elsewhere, Affleck described his full directorial debut, the short satire I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney, as “horrible” before adding: “It’s atrocious”. I suspect that years of being so panned leads to being so self-critical.
