When Ben Affleck shut down an entire movie over an accessory: “It did not come to blows”
The higher up the food chain an actor or filmmaker gets, the more likely they are to have their demands met. With that in mind, Ben Affleck was well-placed to assume that there wouldn’t be any issues when he refused to get down from a pedestal he’d been standing on his entire life.
After all, the star and filmmaker had two Academy Awards to his name for writing Good Will Hunting and directing Argo to ‘Best Picture’, and he’d been around Hollywood long enough to feel confident that when he chose to speak up, the people around him would be willing to listen regardless of whether it was co-stars, crew members, auteurs, or studio executives.
However, David Fincher happens to be an uncompromising director with a sense of meticulousness that hovers somewhere between perfectionism and obsession, and history is littered with tales of how he refuses to cut and move onto the next scene unless his vision has been realised by the performers, which can often take dozens upon dozens of takes.
On the surface, a character walking around in an airport doesn’t come across as one destined to cause friction, only for Affleck to shut down production on Fincher’s Gone Girl because he steadfastly refused to wear the hat sported by Nick Dunne that was stipulated on the page.
Then again, maybe Fincher should have seen it coming from a mile away because anybody who knows anything about Affleck knows he’s a diehard Bostonian through and through. In the script, Nick attempts to go incognito by wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap, but as a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox, the star wasn’t having it for a second.
While the case could be argued that Affleck was playing a fictional character in a fictional film, the counterpoint is that anyone with a vested interest in a sports team can’t stretch the suspension of disbelief that far. Ally McCoist did play a former Celtic striker in A Shot at Glory, though, but he doesn’t have two Oscars and A-list status.
Cognisant of his standing away from the silver screen, Affleck put it to Fincher that if he was seen onscreen wearing a Yankees cap, then he’d spent the rest of his days being taunted by New Yorkers and Bostonians alike, a risk he wasn’t willing to take when he’d always been a dedicated Red Sox man.
Neither was willing to budge, so naturally, shooting on Gone Girl ground to a halt. “I really wanted it to be a Yankees cap,” Fincher admitted on the film’s commentary track. “Being from Boston and not being very professional as an actor, Ben refused to wear a Yankees cap. I mean, it did not come to blows, but we had to shut down production for four days.”
The standstill was eventually settled when Affleck begrudgingly agreed to sport New York Mets apparel, with the Yankees clearly a step too far if he adorned himself with the logo of another one of the city’s baseball teams instead.
