Why Ben Affleck was cut from the ‘Buffy’ movie
Before giving rise to the hugely popular TV series that lasted for seven seasons and 144 episodes, Buffy the Vampire originated as a not-very-good movie with a fleeting appearance from Ben Affleck, who wasn’t even convincing in a bit-part role.
In one of his very first feature film appearances, the future two-time Academy Award winner found immense pressure placed upon his shoulders as ‘Basketball Player #10’, without whom the high school-set horror comedy couldn’t have possibly succeeded, such was the weight of expectation.
Although he was still fairly new to the glitz and glamour of the industry, Affleck was ready to seize the opportunity with both hands and deliver the single greatest line reading cinema had ever experienced. Unfortunately, whether that’s what he did or not, nobody will ever know.
Matt Damon’s BFF and Jennifer Lopez’s husband is present, accounted for, and uncredited in director Fran Rubel Kuzui’s box office bust, but the voice that emerges from Basketball Player #10’s mouth definitely isn’t his. Why? Because Affleck was so terrible, he couldn’t even string two words together to an extent that satisfied the production crew.
“Apparently, I’m so bad in that movie,” he said during an appearance on SiriusXM. “I had one line. It was ‘Take it,’ I think.” That’s all he had to say, but when Affleck descended upon the cinema to catch his star-making performance in the flesh, he discovered that somebody else had been drafted in after he’d failed to master the simple soundbite written on the page.
“I went to the movie and I was like, ‘That is not my voice. That is not me,'” he continued. “Apparently the director hated my performance so much that she looped the entire performance, which was one line. So, yes, I am dubbed in English!”
The words ‘take it’ were something Affleck “couldn’t say convincingly enough”, necessitating Buffy the Vampire Slayer having to “pay someone to come in and say it” in his absence. That’s undeniably embarrassing, but it didn’t put the aspiring actor and filmmaker off chasing his dreams, although it did presumably have an impact in convincing him that the best way of making it in the cutthroat world of Hollywood was to simply do it himself.
Fortunately, that came along eventually when he and Matt Damon co-wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting, the critical darling and awards season favourite that rocketed the pair of them into the positions they’ve continued to occupy for the last quarter of a century. Still, it remains a lost piece of history that Affleck’s original recording of his Buffy the Vampire Slayer dialogue remains lost forever because it must have been truly terrible to see him overdubbed in his native tongue.
