"Here," say Ben Affleck, sliding over two neat stacks of five yellow chips redeemable for $1,000 each at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. "I'll give you $10,000 if you let me write the piece." It must be 3 a.m., and over the past two hours Affleck has taken in about $20,000 at the blackjack table. Even though he switched from Diet Cokes to double vodka-cranberries an hour ago, he's on his biggest hot streak of the night, having won the past four hands.
If it weren't for the inordinate amount of money he has been throwing around, Affleck would hardly stand out in the sanitized keg party that is the Hard Rock. He and his friends look no less glassy-eyed with anticipation than the computer-convention refugees who flood the bar. (Men outnumber women here at least five to one; discount the waitresses, and the ratio raises considerably.) "I hate it when people call these guys my entourage," Affleck says. "Before we got famous, I was always in Derrick's entourage, and Matt was in Soren's entourage. Affleck stops talking to concentrate on his game, and the Hard Rock's constant blast of rock 'n' roll takes over the table. The men in shirtsleeves at the bar, the cocktail waitresses, the dealers, all simultaneously mouth the words to songs that are tattooed onto their collective unconscious: "Where the Streets Have No Name," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Peaceful Easy Feeling." The songs seem to make the act of parting with money a less lonesome event; it's as if pulling one-armed bandits or slugging back shots of Jagermeister, everyone in this canned party atmosphere becomes an extra in an MTV video. A good song - say, the Stones' "Angie" - slows everything down, invoking a kind of nostalgia and rare moments of Vegas introspection. "I never thought I'd have any money," Affleck says as he surveys his expanding pile of chips. (His card-counting system has been working well - when he plunks down a hefty stack of chips, you can bank on seeing some royalty flash across the table.) "But I also know that this success I'm having is nothing permanent, you know what I mean? I have this huge fear that I'll end up 55 and broke and unable to support my wife and kids." "Dude, what are you talking about?" says Soren, the more surly and protective of the two friends - officially, he's Afflecks assistant. "That's not a possibility." "I just so much hate the idea of achieving something and losing it," says Affleck. "That's the definition of a has-been." Beck's "Loser" is playing, and for once no one is mouthing the words.
Certainly not Affleck; he has been tipping the cocktail waitresses with $100 chips. He knows it won't last forever, and he wants to make the most of it. He asks the pit boss to up the casino's maximum bet from $3,000 a hand to $5,000. "They did it for Bruce Willis at the Taj Majal in Atlantic City," he says, appealing to the pit boss's sense of pride, justice, and celebrity pandering. No dice. The gambling jaunt Affleck is speaking of was one of several during the six-month shoot of Armageddon, in which he helps Willis save the world from an asteroid collision, hopefully without upstaging him. "I actually don't drink that much," Affleck says, ordering another round from Pamela, the cocktail waitress, a Raquel Welch look-alike who's already tallied enough tip money this evening to buy a decent used car. "Ben drinks the least of all of us," Soren says. "It's been that way since high school." "I drink with the least frequency, but when I do, I drink more," Affleck says, a qualification that seems intended to lend his claim the air of believability. "Matt's the one who's become the big drinker." The deck hits a cold patch, and Derrick suggests that they wind down to Club Paradise, a strip club across the street. Affleck shakes him off. "These guys like to take me around as bait to pick up women," he says. "Hey, it's not my fault you got a girlfriend the minute you became a celebrity," jokes Derrick. "I can't really go to strip clubs," Affleck says, looking up from the dealer's hands. "I have this problem with compulsive honesty, and I know that I can't exactly tell my girlfriend, 'We went to a strip club in Vegas because we were really bored. And when we got there it was ever more boring.' Her response is not going to be, 'Oh, great, what was your favorite stripper's name?' I mean, in Pittsburgh, where there's nothing to do, maybe I've got an excuse. But not in Vegas."
There's a pause as Affleck anticipates the next question. "Okay, let's just cut the crap right here and now. We all know I'm dating Gwyneth Paltrow, so to pretend otherwise is just silly. The two of us sort of vowed that we wouldn't talk about our relationship, so we've been sticking to 'We're just good friends,' but . . . whatever. I feel bad because I completely froze out another reporter from that line of questioning, but what can I do?" The first light of morning shines through the Hard Rock's glass doors.
Soren has gone up to the complimentary suite, leaving Derrick to look after Affleck. "What are you doing?" he says, as Affleck loses three grand on a bad hand. "You're not being careful." "I had to do it," Affleck says. "The deck was hot. I was due for some face cards." He's getting tired, though he doesn't look it. "Are you disgusted with the gross disregard for money?" he asks, suddenly self-conscious about the extravagant display I've been privy to. "What can I do? It's a capitalist world we live in, and this is the grease." Having switched to coffee, he takes a gulp. "So what kind of hatcher job are you going to write, anyway?" Once again, he pushes over the two small piles of chips. "Here's your second: Take the $10,000," he says. "It's a significant portion of your yearly income. To me, this article could be worth, like a million dollars because, I swear to God, this kind of stuff changes the perception of what I'm worth to sell a movie." The offer is more serious this time, if only because the size of Affleck's pile has dimished significantly in the past few hours. But since it is almost 8 a.m., I take this as my cue to leave and get some sleep. Affleck is not about to capitulate, however, even as his chips steadily vanish. To end the night on a losing streak would be to admit failure, and that is something he simply refuses to do.
Several things become apparent while spending a night drinking and gambling with Ben Affleck. The first is that he's more shrewd businessman than self-absorbed actor. He's a strategist who believes he's figured out a way to beat impossible odds. Whether he's playing blackjack, carving out a Hollywood career, or trying to ensure that a magazine cover story furthers his agenda, Affleck conveys a distinctly American optimism, a conviction that he will succeed by the sheer force of his persistence, desire to win, and smarts. For an actor who is not a member of the Church of Scientology, he's strangely free of self-doubt. He plays Vegas with the light-hearted confidence of someone who thinks that he has the system beat and that it's only a matter of time before reality confirms it.
The other unavoidable truth that emerges during the course of our evening is that Affleck has elevated being a homeboy to an art form. He's an excellent companion, the ultimate partner in crime. Seeing him play a quintessential best friend in Good Will Hunting - loyal, supportive, the designated driver - is still no preparation for the real thing. He's intimate, focused, curious, and always the last one to leave the party. "The night of the Academy Awards, Matt and I were in bed at midnight," says Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant. "Ben was, like, the head of the guys who ended up in a hotel at five in the morning drinking." Kevin Smith, who says Affleck's the best letter writer he knows, describes his appeal most succinctly: "He's a cuddly sonofabitch, isn't he?"
Being cuddly is not the first quality you look for in an actor whose job, in Armageddon, is to save the world from trillions of tons of hurtling space rock. Without a doubt, Affleck was an unlikely choice to star in a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action flick as a macho-man oil driller who gets enlisted to fly into outer space and blow up an asteroid. But for Affleck, playing a man of action was the opportunity he'd been chasing for years. Before he won an Oscar for cowriting Good Will Hunting with Damon, or took the Sundance Film Festival by storm portraying sensitive studs, in both Chasing Amy and Going All the Way, Affleck made his living playing jerks in such teen flicks as School Ties, Glory Daze, and Mallrats. "I thought for a long time I had better make people believe I can play a leading man," Affleck says. "Otherwise I would never get the girl." It's an ambition that, as he sees it, only a hypocrite would deny. "I hate this whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bulls**t. You see these dudes greased up with baby oil, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol." If anything, Affleck relishes the accoutrements of being a celebrity - the motorcycle, the gambling, the perks - a little too much. One of the youngest people ever to win an original-screenplay Oscar, he's garnered the highest honor in a field that he never set out to conquer. What Ben Affleck wants to be is a movie star. Whether he's suited for it or not, he is going for the jackpot: He's out to prove he can save the world, get the girl, and look pretty damn good while doing it.
I don't see Affleck again until around 2 p.m. the next day. He hasn't slept since he arrived in Vegas - after I left him, he went to the Mirage to play a few rounds with the real high rollers, and lost. Now he's back, sitting alone at a Hard Rock blackjack table, wearing the same clothes he had on last night, drinking orange juice and throwing down $500 a hand. We head up to his room for lunch to discuss life on the Armageddon set. "I want to be a director, and I thought it would be a really interesting lesson: doing a movie for $250,000 [Chasing Amy] and then doing Armageddon for 400 times that. I wanted to see what you get in terms of production value." Affleck is talking while taking a leak with the door open, behavior oddly befitting the wise-guy lavishness of his suite. "The problem was that I was intimidated by the scope of the movie," he continues. "The amount of money they were spending, all the other actors in the movie, Michael [Bay, the director], the crew - everything. I remember feeling unhappy, and frustrated that I wasn't doing a good job. And Michael could come across as a real a**hole. He would flat out yell at me. He doesn't get offended if you yell back - that's the way to work with him. But the truth is, I think he just liked to torment me."
"Ben was trying to experiment with a lot of things," says director of photography John Schwartzman, who also worked with Bay on The Rock. "Some of them Michael loved, and others he didn't." When Affleck was hired for Armageddon, Good Will Hunting had not yet opened, and he was a virtual unknown. "At first, I swear I thought I had made a mistake [in casting him]," Bay says. "The chemistry wasn't there. We started shooting right in the middle, so it was tough. And then, a couple of weeks in, I realized he was giving us gold." Affleck had to beef up for the part. "I felt like I was being crammed into the Hollywood grinder, with Michael Bay laughing and manically cranking the wheel," Affleck says. "It was the cliche of him being like, 'You have to work out because you have to be studly.' " And then there was Willis. "Michael would say, 'Bruce is always giving you a hard time, don't worry,' " Affleck recalls. "And Bruce thought Michael and I didn't get along. So it created this very weird triangle. They were actually arguing with each other - through me. Bruce was going, 'You wouldn't do that; that's f**king retarded.' And Michael goes, 'You would do that because I think it's cool.' And Bruce was like, 'If you do that, I won't be in this movie.'
" The real clash of the titans erupted over, of all things, whether Affleck should take his shirt off. In the scene where an oil rig is about to explode, the two stars were scripted to run around, turning levers frantically. Bay thought it would be "cool" if Affleck threw off his flannel shirt and finished the scene wearing only a tank top. When Willis got wind of the plan, he blew his gasket. "Bruce was like, 'It doesn't look cool, it looks like a f**kin' Drakkar Noir commercial,' " Affleck says. "And Michael's like, 'What are you talking about, I f**kin' love p***y!' Which I guess was a reference to Drakkar Noir commercials having a very male, homoerotic, men-twisting-iron-and-their-muscles-rippling kind of connotation." "That was Bruce's vanity," says Schwartzman of the tank-top imbroglio. "Ben is a very handsome guy, and [Willis was feeling] a bit of 'The king is dead! Long live the king!' " Affleck ended up doing the scene with his shirt off. And at the end of the day, he was just happy to be earning a decent paycheck. "Six hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to a brother like me," Affleck says. "I just thought, I'm set for life. Gone fishing. I've got my 600 bones, and I won't have to do any more s**tty movies that I don't want to do."
The story of Ben and Matt, the two kids from Boston who wrote their own script and won an Oscar, is now as much a part of Hollywood mythology as Schwab's drugstore. But as with any Cinderella story - particularly one so thoroughly exploited to promote Good Will Hunting - there were bound to be a few evil stepsisters spreading the schadenfreude. And sure enough, before last year's Oscar ballots were due, rumors began to circulate in Hollywood that Affleck and Damon had not actually written their script. Affleck's post-Golden Globe quip "We're like the Milli Vanilli of Hollywood" certainly didn't help. The conspiracy theorists alleged the involvement of such ghost authors as William Goldman, Damon's Harvard roommate, and Silence of the Lambs writer Ted Tally. "At first I thought it was absurd," says Affleck. "I mean, I have every single draft of the movie on my computer and in handwritten notes. The Milli Vanilli thing was just a reference to feeling like somebody was going to tap us on the shoulder and go, 'We're sorry, we made a mistake, you didn't win. Don't be silly. There are grown men who have been working years whose work warrants credit and acclaim. Not you!' "
The real uncredited influence on Good Will Hunting, however, was not a college roommate or a script doctor. It was Affleck's father. Although Ben was raised solely by his mother from age eleven on, his father's presence has always loomed large in his imagination. Tim Affleck was an actor at the prestigious Theater Company of Boston, which had featured Dustin Hoffman, James Woods, and Robert Duvall. But the father Ben remembers was a man forced to support his family through a series of odd jobs. "He was a janitor at Harvard, he was a bartender," Affleck says, uncomfortably fiddling with the giant serrated steak knife that has come with his room-service burger. "He was the inspiration for a lot of stuff in the movie: The perspective on class, intelligence, snobbery. Being around a bunch of punk kids who went to Harvard, I used to always think they looked down on him as the janitor, when he was really an extremely smart guy."
Tim Affleck is also an alcoholic. He has been sober since 1990 and now works at a recovery center for drug and alcohol abuse near Palm Springs. Although Ben and his father are in touch, the younger Affleck worries whether his success will create more distance in their relationship. "He thinks it's a drag to have people call him and be like, 'Could you get your son to read a script?' " Ben says, taking a long, coiled pause to carve figure eights in the couch he's laying on. "I think he's proud of me. Uh, yeah, he's proud of me. But I mean, how many Afflecks are there? I should have changed my name." Tim never made it to the Good Will Hunting premiere or the Academy Awards. "Of course I invited him," Ben says. He's my dad. He's like, 'I'll skip the Academy Awards. See ya another time. Watch it on television.' "
Like those of many men his age, Affleck's feelings about his father are an intensely ambivalent muddle. He's proud of his dad's blue-collar street cred, his fierce intelligence, and his legend in the Boston theater community. But, as he revealed during the last night's alcohol-fueled blackjack binge, he's also afraid of inheriting his father's afflictions. "Having somebody in your family who's [an alcoholic] - that's difficult. It's certainly something I continue to deal with - " There's a knock on the door. It's Soren. "Dude," he says through a crack in the door connecting their suites, "we're going to miss our plane." The interruption offers the perfect escape from talking about the hard stuff. But Affleck's not done yet. He tells Soren to change the flight and slams the door. "We have a good relationship, very fraternal," Affleck continues. "My dad doesn't give me a hard time about s**t, and I don't give him a hard time about the mistakes he's made. We have a very similar sense of humor and outlook on things. You know, I love him. He's my father. People's lives are how they are." He sighs and lights a cigarette. His booming voice lowers to a near whisper. "If he had to do it all over, I'm sure he'd rather have quit drinking sooner. But life doesn't work that way. It's been a character-building thing, but I have a lot of regrets. . ." He takes another long drag and stops himself. "It's also too bad. I love him, and he's my dad, and that's the way it is."
Soon after Tim Affleck moved out, Ben discovered his own reckless streak. His mom, Chris, a school-district employee, and his younger brother, Casey (also an actor, and one of Ben's costars in Good Will Hunting), were no match for his rebellious instincts. "There is nothing worse than a thirteen-year-old boy," Affleck says. "You're embarrassed by your parents, and you're trying to find your independence because, deep inside, you are so dependent on your mom." Even his career choice was an act of defiance. Neither of Affleck's parents wanted him to become an actor - especially his mom. Still, he did reasonably well as a child, getting cast in a Burger King commercial and an after-school special. In high school he was known as "that actor kid from TV." He had an agent (Joanne Colonna, who also represented Damon) and was making a lot more money than any of his chums. Chris Affleck thought she had made sure all Ben's checks went into a college trust fund. But she was no match for Ben's wiles: He conned the bank tellers into allowing him to withdraw his earnings. "I would take everybody out to eat, pay for all day at the arcade," Affleck says with a big, goofy grin. "I hid all the bank statements under my mattress, and eventually, when my mom was changing my sheets - which is embarrassing enough at sixteen - she found out. She was convinced I was on crack, so she sent me to Outward Bound. It was my rehab!" After graduating from high school, Affleck enrolled at the University of Vermont, where he lasted a semester before heading to L.A. to pursue an acting career. There he lived in a trashed-out Hollywood apartment, until he was cast in School Ties. "I thought, I'm making $30,000, my friends, so things are all set," he says. "I moved to a house a block from the beach, with Matt, Derrick, and Soren. We lived there for three months and uh, ran into some problems with the landlord. Lied about how many people were living there." Affleck then basically spent the next six years leading the usual actor's binge-and-starve lifestyle. "I made twenty grand on a Danielle Steele movie-of-the-week, and I went out and bought Sega like a motherf**ker," Affleck says, pacing his hotel room, eating Oreos from the box. "I was like, 'I can stay home and play Sega if I want to. And I want to!' " And then there were the lean times. "After I had done Dazed and Confused," he says, "where I was the only unlikable character in a cast full of likeable characters, everybody thought I was an a**hole, which is not much help when you're looking for a job. After that movie I was probably the poorest I ever was." But even now, as he sits in his suite, plucking strawberries from an overflowing fruit basket (a gift from the hotel), Affleck doesn't seem to have fully recovered from Hollywoods' initial injection. "Agents used to tell me, 'You have baby fat on your face,' and 'You're not good-looking enough,' " he says. "For a long time the thing was blond and waifish, and that's not my thing. I was always getting characterized as 'beefy.' That's just not a flattering thing to say about somebody." "He was never fat," says Colonna, whom Affleck left last year to sign with CAA. "But he did have this little-boy face, and Hollywood did not think of him as a leading man." The scrappy, goateed world of independent films provided him an alternate route. He met Kevin Smith when they worked on the director's 1993 film Mallrats. "I was like, 'Why is Affleck always playing the bully?' " Smith says. "He's so not that. Around that time I started writing Chasing Amy, and I decided to write him a leading-man part." Affleck also has Smith to thank for being the guardian angel who brought the Good Will Hunting screenplay to the attention of Miramax's Harvey Weinstein. Miramax ponied up $1 million to buy the script from Castle Rock; soon thereafter, Van Sant expressed interest in directing it. In typical form, Affleck was the first man on the scene, determined to seal the deal. "We met at Denny's in L.A. the week after I'd called him about the script," says Van Sant. "He was just really, really excited. He was like a giant golden retriever with a ball." Affleck is preoccupied by the fear of going back to sleeping on his friends' couches. "I really don't want to be in a position where I have to borrow $500 from somebody," he says. "It's like, 'What the f**k's wrong with you? What did you do with all your bread?' "My fantasy as a kid was to win one of those shopping sprees where you pull everything off the shelves," he says. "I kinda see my current position like that: 'Here's your five minutes in the toy store, so you gotta do all the good movies you can before Chuck Woolery rings the bell.' " Still, the pitfalls of celebrity are already becoming obvious. "Relationships that you have with people prior to everyone knowing who you are change," he says. "That person gets sick of being referred to as 'Ben Affleck's friend.' I always thought of this media stardom as the by-product of the actual work you did, when, in fact, it is much more than that." Such as being Paltrow's boyfriend. "I have a tremendous and storied history of failure in relationships with people who weren't actresses," he says, referring to the added degree of stress he feels about his first move-star romance. "I was bad at relationships before journalists were interested in what relationships I was in. That's what makes me afraid to fall in love. "The specifics of my [current] relationship are closer to the ultrapedestrian specifics of all my previous ones," he says, noting that he and Paltrow have not seen each other for two and a half weeks, their longest time apart since they started dating in October. "I'm trying to prevent thing that I care about from becoming unattainable to me because of my job." Now the Vegas sky is dark again, and the Hard Rock's flashing neon guitar sign gives Affleck's suite a seedy yellow pulse. Soren bursts in one last time, reminding him that he has an hour left to gamble before they have to catch their flight. These are his last few moments to be reckless and irresponsible before flying to L.A., where he must head straight to the editing room for some last-minute looping with Bay. "I'm going to go down there and spend my life savings," Affleck says. He smiles as he disappears into the casino.
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