He may be a big-time Hollywood star, but Ben Affleck is a Boston boy at heart.
Affleck has appeared in more than 30 movies, won an Oscar for screenwriting, and now he’s on his way to becoming an established director. His second film, “The Town,” is out this week.
“Directing is great; it gives you a broader sense of authorship,” he said. “And it’s much more terrifying when you feel like everything’s coming apart and it’s not working, ’cause you’re responsible for the whole farm, not just the silo of your performance.”
The early buzz is that the whole farm is fine. Affleck also stars in this movie about a bank heist turned affair of the heart in the Charlestown section of Boston – and his character wants out.
Yet when it comes to Boston, Ben Affleck can’t seem to get enough of this place.
“How much of Boston is in your blood?” Mitchell asked.
“You know, a fair amount,” Affleck said. “I mean, it’s the only place that I have any frame of reference for.”
Born in Berkeley, Calif., he moved to Cambridge. “It was a good neighborhood. It was a part of the city that was, you know, a lot of working people, a lot of sense of community.”
His parents divorced, and his mother, a schoolteacher, raised Ben and his brother Casey (also an actor) as a single mom.
Ben caught the acting bug early.
“My mother’s best friend was a local casting director here, and she and her partner actually cast me in a couple of little things when I was young,” he said. They included a PBS special and, at 16, a Burger King commercial.
“And the Burger King commercial was, like, a big failure, too!” Affleck said. “I mean; how do you fail in a Burger King campaign? Oh horrible – it was humiliating.”
Somehow, he survived. Besides, he could commiserate with his good buddy and schoolmate, Matt Damon.
“What attracted you guys to each other, you think?” Mitchell asked.
“Hard to say. He lived two blocks away from me. I had done a few acting gigs. He really was interested in being an actor. And, you know, we just had a good time. We became close and we’ve been close ever since.”
Ben took us to his old high school. “They’re renovating it, as you can see.”
And on its stage he appeared with his brother and Damon.
“You know, most of what we did here, we kind of wrote ourselves out of improvisation,” Affleck said. “It was the thing that gave us the sense that we could write ourselves because we spent time – we felt like we were writing plays and we were writing plays in high school.
“And I definitely got a sense of, you know, you can take the bull by the horns, that you can do it and that you can cross those sort of artificial-looking boundaries.”
“For those of us who have never been on the cover of People magazine as the Sexiest Man Alive,” Mitchell asked, “Tell me what that’s like.”
“Yeah, that felt kind of embarrassing, you know?” Affleck said. “It was just a marketing thing. It sells magazines. You know, it could be you, it could be somebody else.”
“It’s not gonna be me,” said Mitchell.
“You never know. Did you fill out your application? I did not. Maybe I should get on that right away.”
Affleck said, “I just thought, like, this is just yet another step towards a certain kind of overexposure that happened at that time that I knew was gonna be ultimately not good for me.”
