There are essentially 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 pitch-perfect masterpiece “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 policeman’s pistol away from him. Yet he’s a wrecking ball of emotions following several family tragedies. And laugh-out-loud funny, as well.
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” in and out of the entertainment industry.
“For the moment, when you get an opportunity to do something like ‘Manchester by the Sea,’ it never even crossed my mind to do anything else. I can’t believe I’m getting to do this. Right now I’m feeling pretty excited about being an actor.”
Staying focused
The emotional transitions in filming the show, which has big spikes of stress and adrenaline throughout, were “very, very hard to make. It’s impossible, completely impossible, to go home calm and relaxed. I have seen actors, generally older, who have developed that muscle.
“I feel obligated to do my very, very best and make it my only focus in my life during that period,” he continued. “No matter what, no matter how painful it was or how tired I got. The part seeps its way through your pores inside of you.”
In a scene in which he was supposed to see the cadaver of a loved one in a morgue, “I was feeling completely upset. I just could not reset myself and I was very embarrassed to be crying in front of all these people, having this uncontrollable, grief-stricken moment. It’s not much consolation, but you at least feel something’s happening here. That’s what the days are like and when it’s over you’re glad to have some emotional release and go home to look at the dialogue for the next day.”
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 previously 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.”
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