Just because he has an affinity for bats, it doesn’t mean that Ben Affleck is the first person to come to mind when it comes to some of the best vampire movies ever made. That said, we’re pretty pleased to hear that he actually had a small part to play in one of them.
Ben Affleck is on most people’s minds nowadays for his new movie Air, the sports movie that studies the collaboration between Michael Jordan and Nike. But in a recent interview on The Late Late Show, Affleck describes one of his early Hollywood experiences, and the subsequent feeling of have been semi-cut from a movie.
“The most humiliating thing was in one of my early parts. I got one line, I just moved out to LA, I got a line in a movie. And I was a basketball player.”
“It was a small film called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not the television version, the actual opus that inspired the subsequent long-running series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he says.
“Kristy Swanson starred, and I was a basketball player, that just happened to be playing high school basketball. And a werewolf or a vampire ran through and I got scared, cause he was scary. And I said, ‘Here you go, take the ball’, or something like that.”
“And I thought my work was good. I was feeling it. I felt authentically afraid. And we did it a bunch of times, and I thought, ‘Boy, this director’s really vigorous’. And I went and saw the movie with friends. It wasn’t quite the Meryl Streep build up.”
“And I sounded very different, and I realised right then that they re-recorded my lines. I was so bad, they needed me to be in the scene but the director was obviously [saying], ‘I can’t hear the voice again!’ They had to pay someone to come in and say, ‘Hey man, take it,’ because apparently I couldn’t say that convincingly enough.”
For the whole Affleck and nothing but the Affleck, check out our list of best Ben Affleck movies, as well as our Air review. Don’t forget to check out our Renfield review too, as well as our list of the best movies of all time.