Casey Affleck

Casey Affleck: The Quietest Man in the Room

The film he made immediately after winning the Academy Award for Best Actor was *A Ghost Story*, in which his character dies within the first few minutes and he spends the remainder of the running time under a white bedsheet. It is not a normal follow-up to an Oscar. It is entirely consistent with a career built on the conviction that the most interesting thing an actor can do is withhold — and with a public life in which the withholding eventually became the problem.

Central Square

Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt was born on 12 August 1975 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and grew up in Central Square, Cambridge, in a politically active, liberal household full of people who worked in the arts. His mother, Christine Boldt, was an elementary school teacher educated at Radcliffe and Harvard; his father, Timothy Byers Affleck, worked as an auto mechanic, carpenter, bookie, electrician, bartender and Harvard janitor. His older brother is Ben Affleck.

His parents divorced when he was nine; the boys lived with their mother and saw their father weekly. His father struggled with alcoholism, entering rehabilitation when Casey was fourteen and eventually working as an addiction counsellor in Indio, California — reconnecting with a sober father transformed the relationship. He acted constantly at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and credits a teacher there, Gerry Speca: "He kind of turned me on to acting, why it can be fun, how it can be rewarding." At eighteen he moved to Los Angeles and shared a house with Ben and Matt Damon, studied politics at George Washington University, transferred to Columbia, and left after two years of the Core Curriculum to act full time.

A Career That Started at Thirteen

His professional debut came in 1988 in the PBS film *Lemon Sky*, playing Kevin Bacon's brother, followed in 1990 by young Robert F. Kennedy in the miniseries *The Kennedys of Massachusetts*. His first substantial film role was as a sociopathic teenager in Gus Van Sant's *To Die For* (1995), shot in Toronto, where he became friends with Joaquin Phoenix — a friendship that would later cost him a great deal. In 1997 he appeared in Van Sant's *Good Will Hunting*, written by his brother and Damon, in a part written for him and largely improvised.

Then a decade of range without stardom: the mechanic brothers of Soderbergh's *Ocean's Eleven*, *Twelve* and *Thirteen*; co-writing and starring in Van Sant's experimental *Gerry* with Damon in 2002; the West End production of Kenneth Lonergan's *This Is Our Youth*; and a first lead in Steve Buscemi's *Lonesome Jim* in 2006.

Robert Ford

The year everything changed was 2007. He played Robert Ford opposite Brad Pitt in *The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford*, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and starred as an out-of-his-depth private investigator in *Gone Baby Gone*, his brother's directorial debut. The Ford performance established his signature register: a soft, high, hesitant voice used as a weapon, and a character whose interior life is visible only in what he cannot bring himself to say.

He worked steadily afterwards — a serial killer in *The Killer Inside Me* (2010), *Tower Heist* (2011), *ParaNorman* (2012), a 1970s Texas outlaw opposite Rooney Mara in *Ain't Them Bodies Saints* and an Iraq veteran with PTSD in *Out of the Furnace* (both 2013), Nolan's *Interstellar* (2014), and in 2016 both *Triple 9* and *The Finest Hours*.

Manchester by the Sea

Lonergan's *Manchester by the Sea* was to have starred Matt Damon, who withdrew over scheduling and recommended Affleck on condition that he replace him; Lonergan readily agreed, calling him "the natural person to go to." As Lee Chandler, a janitor hollowed out by grief, Affleck gave a performance A. O. Scott of the *New York Times* called "one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory." Kenneth Turan described a "quietly ferocious performance, his willingness to submerge himself into this character to an almost frightening extent." David Fear wrote in *Rolling Stone* that "the way Affleck gradually shows you the man's bone-deep grief and emotional damage makes you believe that one of this generation's finest actors has simply been waiting to be coaxed out."

He won the National Board of Review and Critics' Choice awards, the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 89th Oscars in 2017.

I'm Still Here, and What It Cost

In 2010 Affleck self-funded and directed *I'm Still Here*, a mockumentary following Joaquin Phoenix's staged retreat from acting. The press could not tell whether it was real. Turan called it "an interesting but half-baked exercise in persona deconstruction, celebrity politics, and meta-meta-entertainment ... Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch." Affleck later admitted the miscalculation: "We never thought people would actually think it was real."

The production generated two civil lawsuits in 2010. The producer Amanda White sued for $2 million alleging sexual harassment and breach of an oral contract, describing "uninvited and unwelcome sexual advances"; the cinematographer Magdalena Górka sued for $2.25 million, alleging "routine instances" of harassment "within the presence and with the active encouragement of Affleck." He initially denied the claims and threatened countersuits that were never filed; both cases settled out of court on undisclosed terms. Asked about it in 2016 he said: "It was settled to the satisfaction of all. I was hurt and upset — I am sure all were — but I am over it." The allegations resurfaced during the awards season that gave him the Oscar, and he withdrew from presenting Best Actress the following year. In 2018 he went further: "I contributed to that unprofessional environment and I tolerated that kind of behavior from other people and I wish that I hadn't. And I regret a lot of that ... I'm sorry."

He spent two years dealing with the backlash before returning to regular work in 2013. He has since directed and starred in *Light of My Life* (2019), which premiered at Berlin, and appeared in *A Ghost Story* (2017), *The Old Man & the Gun* (2018) with Robert Redford, *Our Friend* (2019), and as Boris Pash in Nolan's *Oppenheimer* (2023).

Why Casey Is Called a Genius

The claim is about a technical faculty, not an intellect, and the technique is unusually easy to name: Affleck acts by subtraction. Where most performers signal an emotion, he plays the effort of suppressing it, letting the audience infer the size of the feeling from the strain of containing it. Scott's phrase — "fiercely disciplined" — is the operative one, because the method requires an almost inhuman refusal of the actor's basic incentive, which is to be seen doing something. Turan's "quietly ferocious" identifies the same paradox from the other side. Three collaborations with David Lowery, three castings by Gus Van Sant, and Lonergan's instant assent to Damon's suggestion all indicate that directors regard him as a specialist in something no one else supplies.

The counter-case has two parts, and both are fair. Artistically, the register is narrow: the damaged, inarticulate, soft-voiced American man is a role he has now played across two decades, and the discipline that is devastating in *Manchester by the Sea* can look like mannerism elsewhere. Morally, the case is more serious. His one directorial experiment of that period produced two harassment suits, and his own eventual account concedes that he created and tolerated an unprofessional environment. A body of work about men who cannot express themselves does not excuse a man who expressed himself badly. The performance is exceptional; the word genius should be applied to it rather than to him.

Legacy

He has been vegan since 1995, campaigns with PETA and Farm Sanctuary, and in 2020 co-founded "Stories from Tomorrow" with his mother, pairing children's original writing with celebrity readers to fund global education and food access. He married Summer Phoenix in Savannah, Georgia, in June 2006 after meeting through her brother Joaquin; they have two sons and divorced amicably in 2017. Whatever else the record holds, the performance at its centre is one of the few in modern American film that convinced critics an actor had finally been coaxed out — and then, characteristically, put a sheet over his head.