Ben Affleck is a bit of an enigma. He is first and foremost an actor who loves being in movies and making movies, but he doesn’t seem to like being a celebrity too much. It does make sense considering that he has been in this industry for so long, he’s probably a little tired of living in the shadow of his best friend Matt Damon, which might be why he has been calling out his messiness lately. He’s just mad that Damon bought a zoo without him.
But since he’s been around for a while, Affleck was recently asked by James Corden if he had ever been fired from a role before, to which the actor responded that he was often fired from projects as a teen due to his unfortunate “tardiness problem.” If you’re going to be late to anything as a teenager, you might as well make it gym class and not a big-budget Hollywood production, but he must have learned his lesson. Affleck did mention a time when his lines were cut from a movie, even though he thought he had delivered a Teen Choice Award-worthy performance.
The actor was 20 when he scored one of his first movie roles as the infamous “Basketball Player Number 10” in 1992’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the movie that inspired the TV show. “I got one line … it was for a basketball player,” he told Corden. His character was supposed to offer the ball to a werewolf that happened to be running through the gym. This movie made $16 million at the box office, by the way.
“I was feeling it. I felt authentically afraid,” Affleck explained of his character. And he looked it, too! “And then I went and saw the movie with friends … and I sounded very different. And I realized right then they re-recorded my line.” Maybe he wasn’t afraid enough. This is what happens when you skip high school gym class.
He continued, “I was so bad. They needed me to be in the scene, but the director [Fran Rubel Kuzui] obviously [was like], ‘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.”
Perhaps this is what inspired Affleck to embark on a life-long journey to insert himself into many basketball-related situations. He and Damon just released Air, so he clearly wasn’t nervous about going back into the basketball court. Even if he should be (because of the werewolves).