Ben Affleck shares the secret to his best performance: 'You need to be able to be free to be bad'

Yahoo

22-04-2025

Ben Affleck knows what his best performance is, and it's not his most famous one.
It's not Batman or Daredevil, nor his turn in the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting or Argo. It's not even the brilliant and socially awkward Christian Wolff, who he's played twice as of the April 25 release of The Accountant 2.
'I don't think I can do it any better than I did in The Way Back,' Affleck told Yahoo Entertainment.
In the 2020 movie, he plays an alcoholic construction worker who returns to the high school basketball team he once dominated as its star years ago to become the coach. He credited Gavin O'Connor, who directed him in The Way Back and both Accountant movies, with helping him pull that off.
'It was a ... time in my life that was quite sensitive and tender and vulnerable,' Affleck explained. 'Gavin was enormously accommodating and sensitive to it, and creates this space [so] I was able to come in and do something that was really meaningful to me as an actor.'
The key to that performance, he said, was having the freedom to make mistakes.
'You need to be able to be free to be bad to do something really good. You need to take big swings,' Affleck said. 'You need to be able to try things where you go, 'Whoa! That was horrible!' And know that the director's not going to be like, 'In a way, that might be great!'
Part of the reason he wanted to work on The Accountant 2 is that he felt like there was more of his character's story to tell. It didn't hurt that the film's director is genuinely one of his favorite collaborators.
'The sensitive care and attention that he pays to all the performances in his movies — I like to think I do the same thing, it's certainly what I aspire to,' Affleck said of O'Connor.
O'Connor told Yahoo Entertainment something Affleck told him during one of their earlier collaborations that has stuck with him: They have the 'same taste.'
'We have a similar aesthetic [and] approach to making movies [with] regard to coming from character,' O'Connor said. 'If you watch The Accountant — both movies — then you look at The Way Back ... it's such a different character. But [we're] once again finding humor, finding life, finding ... the humanity of the character.'
Nearly a decade has passed between the two Accountant movies, so Affleck's autistic, math-loving action hero character has changed and grown as much as the actor has. But something consistent about Affleck's performance still stuck out to O'Connor.
'Playing a genius, which Christian is — he has a one in a trillion brain — I think for an actor, you can fall into the trap of trying to show off. It's really easy to want to be show-offy when you play a genius! And he never does,' O'Connor said. 'It's always coming from a truthful, honest behavioral place ... I think it's Ben's instinct as an actor.'
In the same room for their interview, Affleck and O'Connor couldn't resist lauding each other — especially for this movie that took so long to make.
'I just love him as a person. I love him as an actor,' O'Connor said of Affleck.
'You find a partner that you feel like you work well with, just on a selfish level. I want to hitch my wagon to this guy,' Affleck said of O'Connor.
Affleck is frequently effusive about his favorite collaborators. His bromance with Matt Damon, his costar and Oscar-winning cowriter of Good Will Hunting, frequently makes headlines.
Together, the longtime pals co-founded Artists Equity, the production company behind The Accountant 2 as well as 2024's Apple TV+ film The Instigators starring Damon and Casey Affleck and the upcoming Jennifer Lopez-led Kiss of the Spider Woman.
To Affleck, he's not just investing in projects he and Damon believe in — they 'take advantage of the art of others.'
'[The Accountant 2] was one where I think Artists Equity was just lucky to be in a situation where it could step in and facilitate and unclog the dams that were preventing what I thought was an obvious thing,' he said. 'It was investing in the art of others kind of, because you're taking a risk, whereas I felt like, 'Gosh, this just seems obvious.''
He added that he felt 'fortunate that the entity we built was able to facilitate so we could do the very few key strategic things that needed to be done to finally catalyze this thing.'
Affleck once again credited O'Connor, as well as the film's writer, Bill Dubuque, 'who spent years putting together a story, writing a script [and] rewriting a script.'
'I wouldn't want to write for Gavin, I'll tell you that right now! No offense!' Affleck laughed. 'I can only do like, seven or eight drafts before I start to lose my mind.'
is in theaters April 25.