At the age of 8, he landed his first acting job on a PBS series. Two years later, his parents divorced and, though his father lived nearby, Chris Affleck became the primary parent. Initially, she admits, she wasn’t wild about her kids pretending for a living.
“Acting is one of those things — what are the chances that you’re going to make it? And if you do, you get too much money and too much attention,” she said by phone from Cambridge. “It’s not like trying to turn seaweed into food to feed the hungry masses. I guess I worried it was frivolous.”
But Ben was hooked. With Damon, who lived down the street, he studied drama, acted in high school plays and dreamed of being in movies. After graduating, Affleck enrolled in the University of Vermont. A semester later, while Damon toiled at Harvard, Affleck quit school and headed for Los Angeles.
“When I first got here, I was 18 and I would have done anything that wasn’t a male-on-male adult picture. I needed the experience,” he recalls of those years, which brought occasional paydays (for TV movies, mostly), a few more college credits (from Occidental College) and several periods of poverty.
In 1992, Affleck got his first film part, in “School Ties,” a drama about a Jewish football star (Brendan Fraser) at an anti-Semitic, WASP-y prep school. Affleck was paid $50,000 for the small role; Damon, who had followed his friend to Hollywood, got the bigger part as Fraser’s arch enemy. The next year brought “Dazed and Confused,” in which Affleck played an overzealous bully, and a short-lived TV series called “Against the Grain.”
When money got tight, Affleck lived for a while on Damon’s couch. Only when he was cast in Smith’s “Mallrats” did his career start to pick up speed. But memories of the lean years still make him cautious. When he bought his New York City loft, for example, he paid in cash — “So no matter what happens, I could work at Subway and pay my maintenance fees.”
“It’s a roller coaster, and he’s very aware of that,” says Affleck’s mother, a down-to-earth woman who sends her eldest son copies of the Nation to read, critiques the scripts he is considering and remains one of his closest advisors. “He’s got a lot of sense. He knows you could be up one day and down the next. That reassures me.”
It was to create more choices for themselves as actors that Affleck and Damon set out to write “Good Will Hunting,” which began more as a thriller than as a tale of male friendships. Affleck says he got some ideas from his father, who, like the film’s lead character, had once been a janitor at an exclusive college (the elder Affleck has been sober since 1990 and now counsels at a California rehab center).
The script sold in a frenzied bidding war in the fall of 1994, with Castle Rock Entertainment paying more than $ 1 million if Damon and Affleck would also star. Getting the movie made, however, proved more difficult–it ended up in turn-around and would never have been produced, Affleck says, if Smith hadn’t used his clout to open the doors at Miramax.
The rest of the story is well-known: the landing of Robin Williams as a co-star and Van Sant as director, the box-office success (it grossed $ 138 million domestically), the Oscars (in addition to the screenwriting prize, Williams won for best supporting actor). Now, as Affleck and Damon putter away on two other scripts for Castle Rock and Miramax (tentatively titled “Halfway House,” about a residential home for the mentally ill, and “Like a Rock,” a romantic comedy), Affleck is realistic about their place in the screenwriting pantheon.
“We ended up getting an Oscar, but I see that as a nod to the movie as a whole,” he said. “People responded to our movie. But I think people also liked the back-story–we were young, we weren’t jaded, it really meant something to us to win, or even just to be there.”
It still does.
“Ben is a very serious actor, and he wants to be taken seriously,” said Damon. “He’s read all the books, he’s taken all the classes. He studies it. He thinks about it. When people see the package — a 6-foot-3 really handsome guy — they think of the frivolity of Hollywood. It’s the exact opposite of what he really is.”
