While star student Damon went to Harvard, the bright but distractable Affleck dropped out of the University of Vermont after a few months.
Affleck met Damon at school and the two travelled to auditions together, but their paths diverged. Their father was a sometime actor, a gambler and an alcoholic. As Dave Itzkoff wrote in a 2016 New York Times profile, “ you may find yourself envying, pitying and disliking him all at once”.Īffleck was born into a working-class family in California and grew up in Massachusetts with his younger brother Casey, who also became an actor. Affleck, with his candidly acknowledged flaws and regrets, is Cruise’s opposite. Tom Cruise, who recently turned 60, is perhaps the last true movie star due to his somewhat inhuman denial of vulnerability. He has never enjoyed an imperial phase, when he could do no wrong, nor a real Benaissance, when all is forgiven.
He is of the same generation as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Ethan Hawke and his friend Matt Damon, but he’s the one whose career best illustrates the ups and downs of modern movie stardom, on and off the screen. Newly married to Jennifer Lopez (we’ll get to that), Affleck turns 50 today. Shortly afterwards, Affleck checked into rehab. Before that, there was a meme called Sad Keanu, but Reeves’s apparent dejection suggested a melancholy profundity whereas Sad Ben was just a middle-aged man with a cigarette and a paunch, attracting an odd mix of sympathy and mockery despite his history of anxiety, depression and alcoholism. One image in particular - cigarette in hand, head thrown back, an expression of weary exasperation - has become a meme which roughly translates as “Fuck everything”. A few years ago, when the actor was separating from his wife Jennifer Garner and glumly promoting Batman v Superman, somebody started a Tumblr page called “ Ben Affleck Looking Sad“. But there appears to be an exception for Ben Affleck. It is now generally agreed that there is something grubby about enjoying paparazzi photographs, especially when the subject has mental health issues.
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