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Ben Affleck’s ‘Tabloid Scrutiny’ Helped His Performance In ‘Gone Girl’

By Niki Cruz
Published on: 08:45 PST, Aug 14, 2014

It seems like Ben Affleck has had nine lives in Hollywood. He started out as a promising writer and actor with his breakthrough Oscar winning script Good Will Hunting. After sharing the gold with co-writer and childhood friend Matt Damon, Affleck decided to cash that fame in for a bonafide matinee idol status in box office hits like Armageddon and Pearl Harbor.

Slowly but surely Affleck was saying yes to everything and his box office blunders coupled started to follow. Considering his box office bombs with the over exposure of his relationship to musician Jennifer Lopez, and Affleck found himself not as an actor but the cash cow of the tabloid industry. It was an interesting dichotomy where Affleck could sell himself on tabloids but couldn’t sell himself as anyone worth seeing in theaters.

It wasn’t until his turn as a director with Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the Oscar winning Argo, did it seem like Affleck was back and better than ever. Coming up next for Affleck, besides playing Batman, is David Fincher’s Gone Girl. According to the actor his past being one of the most scrutinized figures in Hollywood actually worked in his favor for once, and was something he could pull on for his upcoming role.

In Fincher’s Gone Girl Affleck plays Nick Dunne an unassuming everyday man who arrives to find his home ransacked and his wife Amy missing. Almost immediately Nick has to deal with his life being turned upside down, and the media is right there to cover his every step as he becomes the number one suspect in his wife’s disappearance and murder.

Entertainment Weekly visited the set and revealed that Ben had a lot in common with Nick Dunne. Describing a candlelight vigil for wife Amy, Nick addresses TV cameras, friends, family and police detectives.

“I may not behave the way the cameras want me to. If you need to mock somebody, mock me. But please don’t turn this investigation into a circus.”

Sound familiar? According to Affleck the media scrutiny his character is suddenly pulled into was all too familiar.

“It wasn’t something I had to do a lot of research for. I knew what it was like to have the tabloid world paying attention to me and ascribing negative motivations to whatever I might be engaging in. I knew what it was to be cast in a soap opera I had no control over.”

According to director David Fincher Affleck was the man for the job from the very beginning.

“We knew we needed somebody who was charming and could be seductive, who could be a ladies man, a guy’s guy, a frat boy. But most important, [someone] who had the wits and experience of knowing that situation. The gift of having Ben Affleck is that this is a guy who knows. He knows what a lose-lose situation is and understands what’s funny about it, however sad.”

Some audiences will get a taste of the film when it debuts at The New York Film Festival on September 26. For others Gone Girl hits theaters on October 3.

[Image via Twentieth Century Fox]

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