Affleck puts it all together in ‘Manchester’
Actor creates full portrait in latest role
There essentially are two Casey Afflecks.
There’s the brooding melancholic, fraught with existential insecurity. And there’s the touch-and-go tough guy picking fights with a frenzied smile that can be interpreted as either crazed or eerily calm.
Affleck, 41, who has steadily built a heavyweight career over the past two decades, with much acclaim and a few misses, has moved between those contrasting twins like a pendulum.
In Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea,” he unites them in a portrait of the full messiness of life. Affleck’s character, Lee Chambers, swings at strangers in bars and is not beyond wrestling a police officer’s pistol away from him. Yet he’s a wrecking ball of emotions following several family tragedies.
And laugh-out-loud funny, as well.
He’s a source of pride for his big brother Ben, who said recently by phone, “He’s a great actor. ... It’s really nice that he got a part where he can really showcase all the things that he can do. He’s nuanced and thoughtful and incredibly realistic, imaginative and I couldn’t be more impressed.”
He had no role in teaching Casey how to act, he said. “I envy his powers of observation. He’s so acute. He picks up things from people and their behavior. I wish I could take credit and say I taught him, but it’s something he’s just been born with.”
His “Manchester” performance alongside Michelle Williams and Kyle Chandler has generated predictions that he’ll be a best-actor Oscar contender since the film premiered at Sundance in January. Casey Affleck said that making the film could put a pause on his recurring remarks that acting might not be his long-term calling.
“Right now I’m having a great time doing it,” he said. “Check in with me next year at this time and who knows? Because of the nature of it, there’s no job security. That cuts both ways. That used to be the bane of my existence as a father of two, trying to save, plan for the future and be all the responsible things you’re supposed to be. I thought, maybe they’ll not have me, or maybe I’ll walk away from it. There are a lot of things I’ve dreamt of doing in my life. I love acting but I can also imagine doing other stuff.”
Not the type to take easy and safe career choices, Affleck has built a collection of features with idiosyncratic directors. He played a West Texas deputy sheriff who is a psychotic murderer in Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me,” the titular assassin in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” for Andrew Dominik, an outlaw on a rapturous criminal spree in David Lowery’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and a starving hiker lost in the desert in Gus Van Sant’s minimalist survival saga “Gerry.”
“I want to pick parts that are a little bit scary and seem like a challenge, because that’s the only way you keep growing, changing, getting better,” he said. “There are also times I have to take a job because I have to support a family and at that moment there’s nothing amazing that’s being presented to me. That list is things I look back on with pride and fond memories. With other things, I think, ‘Well, you can’t win all the time.’
“You have to follow your instinct, because at first glance there are some scripts that look great, but there’s nothing underneath them. Kenny (Lonergan, who had written “Analyze This,” “Gangs of New York” and the Oscar-nominated “You Can Count on Me”) writes in a way that’s really deep, and you can constantly see new things in it. That makes a job fun to work on, because it never gets old.”
Affleck began acting in childhood, cast by a friend of his mother as an extra in TV or movie productions and commercials. “We’d eat doughnuts, get 20 bucks and it was a lot of fun.”
High school theater was where he learned about being an actor “as far as I know anything about it.” Inspired by an excellent teacher, he decided, “This is what I want to do with my life.”
Deciding to forgo college, he drove to California, where it took him most of a year just to find an agent and get auditions, “and those auditions were pretty lousy.” He got no roles until his bags were packed and he was about to return to Massachusetts, when Gus Van Sant hired him to play a delinquent high schooler in “To Die For.”
Now he is acting alongside cast members and filmmakers he admired before getting to work with them.
“I want to pick parts that are a little bit scary and seem like a challenge, because that’s the only way you keep growing, changing, getting better.” CASEY AFFLECK