NOW A DISTINGUISHED 43 YEARS OLD AND WITH AS MANY MOVIE ROLES IN HIS REARVIEW, BEN AFFLECK DON’S THE CAPE OF HIS MOST CONTROVERSIAL CHARACTER YET, A BATMAN WHO BREAKS THE MOLD

BY MATT SCANLON – WITH REPORTING FROM SUSAN HORNIK

The setting for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—quite possibly the year’s biggest film in terms of box office expectation—is that nearly two years have passed since Metropolis suffered through Superman’s spectacular battle with General Zod and his Kryptonian henchmen (and women). The city and planet were saved, but Bruce Wayne is appalled at the damage, which feeds renewed anger vented upon Gotham’s criminals. The real object of his rage, however, turns out to be Superman, and so Gotham City’s famed hero/vigilante takes on Metropolis’s modern-day savior—even as a new threat emerges, courtesy of Lex Luthor.

As they take in the aging persona of billionaire Wayne and his notorious alter-ego, played for the first time by veteran actor Ben Affleck, audiences might need to be primed for a shock.

“In part he’s in keeping with the Batman we recognize, but he has evolved into a bit older, more world-weary slugger nearing the end of his tether, and that was really intriguing to me,” Affleck, 43, explained in studio notes from production company Warner Bros. “Superman’s actions cause a rage in Bruce Wayne that is almost irrational, and that desperate anger and hatred was a fascinating place to build from.”

“We felt an interesting way of beginning this story was to examine Superman from another perspective…Batman’s perspective,” Director Zack Snyder explained. “Bruce doesn’t know who Superman is; all he knows is what the public knows. He blames him for the lives lost in Metropolis, lives that he felt responsible for. His hatred has been building up inside, and now, all this time later, he’s finding reinforcement of those feelings in the media.”

“I think the story really sets the stage nicely for understanding why Batman wants to fight Superman,” said Affleck. “It’s logical to assume that they’d be friends since they’re both good guys, but this film takes a more nuanced view of what sort of complications might come about as a result of their abilities and actions.”

“When we started talking about what would be Superman’s challenge for this next movie, we knew we couldn’t find bigger physical stakes than the destruction of the Earth,” Snyder added, “so we had to make the emotional stakes higher. And who is a more worthy foil for a philosophical war than Batman?”

In early discussions with Snyder dealing with being the eighth TV/film thespian to don the black cape (the others are Lewis Wilson, Robert Lowrey, Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, and Christian Bale), he nurtured an understandable caution.

“I think if I thought too hard about the actors who played this part before, I couldn’t take the job,” said Affleck at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. “Kilmer, Clooney, the great Christian Bale. I talked to Zack about it, and was like, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘I have this vision…this idea for the guy, and you are perfect. He’s like, older…he’s a burnout’ [laughs]. The truth was that he took me through the process of creating a character that I almost didn’t see, and at the end of it, I was sort of astonished to look at it, and said, ‘That’s exactly what you pitched me and I wasn’t sure that I was even doing it.’”

These new ideas, however, were not always welcome by the graphic novel faithful—or even some Batman movie aficionados. In fact, purists of just about every sort were required to approach the $250 million budget film with flexibility, and not always with happy results. The selection of Affleck as the Dark Knight prompted protest petitions to change.org and to the White House website’s “We the People” section, the latter requesting that the Obama Administration “denounce the selection of Ben Affleck.” That petition was briskly removed due to a violation of terms of service, but change. org’s generated 2,500 signatures within hours, and a total of 97,000 before it was closed—reading in part that “[Affleck’s] acting skill is not even close to being believable as Bruce Wayne and he won’t do the role justice. He’s not built, nor is he intimidating enough for the role.”

From Berkeley to Batman
Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt was born in Berkeley, California, but his family moved to Massachusetts when Ben was 2, and both he and his brother Casey were raised in a Cambridge home steeped in the arts and film lore. He started acting at all of 7 years old, and at 8 met a 10-year-old Matt Damon, who lived just blocks away. They became fast friends and went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school together. After attending the University of Vermont briefly, he moved to Los Angeles, attending Occidental College until an early draft of the Good Will Hunting screenplay was ridiculed by a professor there. He acted in a number of small- and medium-scale movie and TV roles through the early 1990s, most famously in Richard Linklater’s cult classic Dazed and Confused.

Affleck, of course, came to prominence in 1997 with Good Will Hunting, which he starred in and co-wrote with Damon. The two won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, as well as a Golden Globe. The following year, Affleck starred in the also Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, and shared a SAG Award for Outstanding Motion Picture Cast.

Dozens of starring turns followed, in films such as To the Wonder, The Company Men, State of Play, He’s Just Not That Into You, Jersey Girl, Daredevil, The Sum of All Fears, Changing Lanes, Pearl Harbor, Boiler Room, Forces of Nature, and Armageddon. Most recently, he was seen in David Fincher’s blockbuster Gone Girl. Prior to that, he directed, produced and starred in the award-winning Argo.

Affleck is also a committed philanthropist. In March of 2010, he founded the Eastern Congo Initiative, the first U.S.-based advocacy and grant-making organization wholly focused on helping the people of eastern Congo create a sustainable and successful society in that long-troubled region. He is also a longtime political activist as well as a supporter of various charitable organizations.

His upcoming films include The Accountant, as well as directing and starring in Live by Night, based on the Dennis Lehane novel.

The DC Cinematic Gamble
To suggest that there is a lot on the line for Warner Bros. in Batman v Superman would be a superheroic understatement. Over the course of last year, Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks Animation profit margins grew, while Fox, Sony, Paramount, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros. saw bottom lines diminish, and the last studio’s mammoth investment in the DC Cinematic Universe (which continues in August with Suicide Squad and next summer’s Wonder Woman) is such that the new film likely needs to at least match The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises individual revenue marks of $1 billion to keep the franchise solvent. It’s been additionally rumored that an opening weekend take akin to Man of Steel’s $116 million would in fact constitute a disappointment for the studio—that it is hoping for something closer to the first Hunger Games take of $152 million.

That’s pressure of an intergalactic kind, not least for Snyder, who explained on the dais at Comic-Con how he aimed to take the already-graphic-novel explored idea of these superheroes duking it out and shooting it with fresh eyes.

“Batman fighting Superman is a thing that happens all the time in comic books, but my love of a particular one [was applied], which is Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [DC Comics, 1997),” said Snyder. “It’s something I definitely homage in the movie as a way of saying to [writer] Frank Miller, ‘You’re a genius, and I think the book is genius.’ But the story here is not that story…it’s one that we came up with on our own. Chris Terrio, who worked with Ben on Argo and did an amazing job—he and I talked about…how do you make this make sense…and also launch it towards what could be more complex ideas with maybe more superheroes?”

One adaptation that raised eyebrows was placing Metropolis and Gotham across the river from each other, a staging that resonated with Affleck on a variety of levels.

“Zack and Chris put together some really interesting ideas of Metropolis being a big successful city and Gotham being a place where there are a lot more downtrodden people,” Affleck offered at the Comic-Con event. “The whole idea of wealth and power and how power engenders fear. There were a lot of ideas that were a little too smart for me to understand [laughs], but that made it feel real to me, and smart…so I was even more proud to be a part of the project.”

“It made sense to us,” Snyder added. “That they were sister cities across a big bay…kind of like Oakland and San Francisco.”

After Affleck made a joke about his age from the dais, Snyder explained that a brand of challenged physicality was intended to be at the heart of new Batman all along, adding that his beefier, more mechanized suit, which has also drawn scrutiny from graphic novel literalists, accentuated that vulnerability.

“Yeah, he’s like mecha-Batman,” the director said with a chuckle, “but [the suit] is not enhancing his strength as much as it’s protecting him. Kind of a self-preservation thing.”

All this character and plot innovation isn’t to suggest, Affleck remarked, that considerable research didn’t go into getting the Dark Knight historically right, and that he wasn’t accepting of very pragmatic advice along the way.

“I had this really weird experience,” he recalled at Comic-Con. “Before we started the movie, I was getting my kid a Halloween costume (my son’s really into Batman, wisely), and we went to a store in Los Angeles that was pretty empty, and I was in the aisle and I heard this ‘Oy!’ It was Christian Bale with his kid! There he and I are, standing in the Batman costume row, and I said, ‘Look, man, you’re the best…so what do you think [about the new film]? Any tips, you know?’ And he said, “Just make sure you can piss in that suit [laughs].”

But was the director of Argo, The Town, Gimme Shelter, and Gone Baby Gone able to park his executive inclinations when it came to daily production? Affleck replied that, “As an actor, you look at the cast, you look at the scripts, and you can only tweak a certain amount…but I remember a day about two weeks in when I read a scene and I thought about how to play it. I came in and I thought it should be this way or that way, then Zack set it up so that it was one long shot, and he put it on a crane so that it encompassed everyone’s dialog… encompassed the [scene’s] scope. Amazing. I remember thinking then that we were in good hands.”