Stardom Doesn't Faze Affleck
Actor and Oscar-winning writer Ben Affleck is hunting these days, not for good will, but for killer asteroids in the summer blockbuster Armageddon that opened Wednesday.
He has had a string of roles in forgettable movies, including School Ties and Mallrats, and in such television movies as The Voyage of the Mimi and Hands of a Stranger. But these days, the 26-year-old Affleck is starring with Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, and Billy Bob Thornton in Disney's most expensive movie ever.
He plays an oil-well worker who helps Willis save planet Earth from a sure-to-destroy-it asteroid.
A California native who grew up in Cambridge, Mass., Affleck found fame when he and Matt Damon, his former roommate and childhood friend, won an Academy Award in March for their screenplay for Good Will Hunting.
"When we won, and the fact that we were so excited about it, people thought - I realized later that people really identify with that," Affleck told CBS 'This Morning' Entertainment Contributor Eleanor Mondale.
"I think we seemed more like normal people than than, you know, some person who's had millions of plastic surgery operations and been an icon forever."
Since the spring, Affleck has been haunted by signs of stardom. When he's asked for his autograph, he said, he is always surprised.
"I'm thinking, 'Why? What are you going to do with it? You're going to take it home and impress somebody'?"
The son of a teacher and drug rehab counselor, Affleck says he tries very hard not to let stardom interfere with his life.
"The way it changes your life is only in as much as you let it," he told Mondale. "It doesn't have to change your behavior, really."
To study for his Armageddon role, Affleck had to live on an oil rig and work out in NASA's neutral buoyancy laboratory, which prepares astronauts for the experience of weightlessness. On the plus side were his love scenes with actress Liv Tyler.
"Liv's, like, really sweet," he said. "I knew her before - her boyfriend was a friend of my brother's. She's sort of like a little sister."
Of his own real-life romance with actress Gwenyth Paltrow, Affleck is mum. "I make it a rule not to talk about my personal life," he said.
Affleck and Paltrow were friends as children, when her mother (actress Blythe Danner) and his father worked in theater. They met up again as adults and have become one of Hollywood's golden couples, photographed by the paparazzi at numerous awards ceremonies.
Affleck now is completing Shakespeare in Love, a romantic comedy filmed in London with Paltrow. His future projects also include Dogma, a religious satire with, among others, his Good Will Hunting colleague Damon; Forces of Nature, a love story with Sandra Bullock; and 200 Cigarettes, a film in which he will appear with his brother, Casey Afflek, who is also an actor.