Casey Affleck
Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt (born August 12, 1975) is an American actor. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Golden Globe Award. The younger brother of actor Ben Affleck, he began his career as a child actor, appearing in the PBS television film Lemon Sky (1988). He later appeared in three Gus Van Sant films: To Die For (1995), Good Will Hunting (1997), Gerry (2002), and in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's film series (2001–2007). His first leading role was in Steve Buscemi's independent comedy-drama Lonesome Jim (2006).
Casey Affleck
Affleck's breakthrough came in 2007, when he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Robert Ford in the Western drama The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and starred in his brother's crime drama Gone Baby Gone. In 2010, he directed the mockumentary I'm Still Here. He went on to appear in Tower Heist (2011), ParaNorman (2012), and Interstellar (2014), and he received praise for his performance as an outlaw in Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013).
In 2016, Affleck starred in the drama Manchester by the Sea, in which his performance as a grieving man earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He has since starred in the dramas A Ghost Story (2017) and The Old Man & the Gun (2018), and as Boris Pash in the biographical thriller Oppenheimer (2023), his highest-grossing release.
Early life and education[edit]
Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt[1] was born on August 12, 1975, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, to Christopher Anne "Chris" Boldt and Timothy Byers Affleck.[2][3][4] The surname "Affleck" is of Scottish origin.[5] He also has Irish,[6][7] German,[8] English, and Swiss ancestry.[9] Affleck's maternal great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Boldt, known for the discovery of the Curmsun Disc, emigrated from Prussia in the late 1840s.[10][11] His mother was a Radcliffe College- and Harvard-educated elementary school teacher. His father worked sporadically as an auto mechanic,[12][13] a carpenter,[14] a bookie,[15][16] an electrician,[17] a bartender,[18] and a janitor at Harvard University.[19] In the mid-1960s, he had been a stage manager, director, writer and actor with the Theater Company of Boston.[20][21][22] During Affleck's childhood, his father was "a disaster of a drinker".[23] Affleck first started acting by "reenacting what was happening at home" during role play exercises at Alateen meetings.[24]
After his parents divorced when he was nine, Affleck and his older brother, Ben, lived with their mother and visited their father weekly.[23] He learned to speak Spanish during a year spent traveling around Mexico with his mother and brother when he was ten.[25] At the time, his brother Ben was filming The Second Voyage of the Mimi, which was set in Mexico. The two brothers spent "all of our time together, pretty much. Obviously at school we were in different grades, but we had the same friends."[25] When Affleck was fourteen, his father moved to Indio, California, to enter a rehabilitation facility, and later worked there as an addiction counselor.[17][26][27][28] He reconnected with his father during visits to California as a teenager: "I got to know him, really, because he was sober for the first time ... The man I knew before that was just completely different."[23][29]
Growing up in a politically active, liberal household in Central Square, Cambridge,[15][30] Affleck and his brother were surrounded by people who worked in the arts,[31] were regularly taken to the theater by their mother,[32] and were encouraged to make their own home movies.[33] The brothers sometimes appeared in local weather commercials and as film extras because of their mother's friendship with a local casting director.[18][29][34] Affleck acted in numerous high school theater productions while a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.[29][35] He has said he "wouldn't be an actor" if not for his high school theater teacher Gerry Speca: "He kind of turned me on to acting, why it can be fun, how it can be rewarding."[35]
At age eighteen, Affleck moved to Los Angeles for a year to pursue an acting career, and lived with his brother and their childhood friend Matt Damon.[36] Despite having "the best possible first experience" while filming To Die For,[37] he spent much of the year working as a busboy at a restaurant in Pasadena. He decided to move to Washington, D.C., to study politics at George Washington University.[18] He soon transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he followed the Core Curriculum for a total of two years.[38][39][40] However, he did not graduate: "I would do a semester of school, go do a movie ... Opportunities kept presenting themselves that were hard for me to turn down ... By then, I didn't really have roots at the school or a group of friends."[37]
Career[edit]
1988–2006: Early work[edit]
Affleck acted professionally during his childhood due to his mother's friendship with a Cambridge-area casting director, Patty Collinge.[37] In addition to local weather commercials and film extra work,[41] he appeared as Kevin Bacon's brother in the PBS television film Lemon Sky (1988), directed by Collinge's husband Jan Egleson,[37] and as a young Robert F. Kennedy in the ABC miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1990).[42] These early acting experiences "meant nothing more than a day off from school" to Affleck, and he only began to consider a career as an actor when in high school.[41] When he later moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in earnest, his first film role was as a sociopathic teenager in Gus Van Sant's 1995 satirical comedy To Die For. During filming in Toronto, Affleck shared an apartment with co-star Joaquin Phoenix and they became close friends.[33] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised Affleck's performance, saying he "skillfully capture[s] the pang of adolescence among no-hopers."[43][44] However, Affleck then had a "disappointing" experience while making the 1996 drama Race the Sun and, "as soon as the film finished, I went to school."[39]
While studying at Columbia, Affleck had a supporting role in Van Sant's Good Will Hunting (1997), written by his brother and their childhood friend Matt Damon.[18][37] Despite arranging a first meeting between Van Sant and his brother to discuss the project, Affleck was reluctant to leave college temporarily to act in the film.[39] He was eventually persuaded to play one of four friends living in South Boston – a role written specifically for him[36] – and improvised many of his lines.[45][46] Jay Carr of The Boston Globe praised the "emotional subtleties and variety" of the performances, and singled out "Casey Affleck's junior member of the quartet, dying to be taken as seriously as the others."[47] Following the film's success, Affleck's career opportunities did not significantly improve. At the same time, his life became exposed to the public and parts of his life became "part of pop culture and public life."[18] Also in 1997, he had a small role in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy, starring his brother. He returned to university for a semester before quitting to focus on his acting career.[39]
Affleck's career entered a "dark" period, with a series of supporting roles in critical and commercial failures.[36][33] He later remarked: "It dawned on me late that I should be selective about what I do."[37] In the independent comedy Desert Blue (1998), he starred opposite Kate Hudson as a small-town jock.[48] Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle felt that, while "interesting", his character was "entirely underdeveloped".[49] In 1999, he made an uncredited cameo in the teen comedy American Pie[50] and appeared as a punk rocker romantically involved with both Gaby Hoffmann and Christina Ricci's characters in the New Year's Eve ensemble comedy 200 Cigarettes.[51][52] In the comedy Drowning Mona (2000), starring Danny DeVito, Affleck played a shy gardener suspected of murder.[53] Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times acknowledged, in an otherwise negative review, that his role was "well played".[54] Also in 2000, Affleck had a small role in the comedy Attention Shoppers and played Fortinbras in Ethan Hawke's Hamlet.[55] He appeared as the brother of Heather Graham's character in the romantic comedy Committed (2000), with Emanuel Levy of Variety praising a "terrific" performance.[56] Also in 2001, he had a small role in American Pie 2 and appeared in the teen slasher film Soul Survivors. Robert Koehler of Variety found him "bland"[57] while Carla Meyer of the San Francisco Chronicle said that he did not make "much of an impression, [but may] have been too depressed to really act."[58] One positive experience Affleck had during this period was working with Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides on Finding Forrester (2000) as Van Sant's assistant and technical consultant: "Can you imagine a better film school than that? Gus is not only somebody who I love a lot but is also who has taught me, maybe more than anybody else in film."[33][59]
Affleck found a degree of commercial success when he was cast in Steven Soderbergh's heist comedy Ocean's Eleven (2001), starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Damon. In roles Soderbergh originally intended for Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson,[60] Affleck and Scott Caan played Mormon brothers and wisecracking mechanics who help to rob three Las Vegas casinos simultaneously.[61] While it was a "great, fun social experience", Affleck spent much of his time on set "being, like, 100 feet away from the camera in the background."[36] He would later reprise his role in Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007).
In 2002, Affleck and Damon starred in Van Sant's experimental drama Gerry, playing two men who get lost while hiking in the desert.[62][63] Affleck, Damon, and Van Sant conceived of the idea and wrote the screenplay together while living in neighboring New York apartments.[45] The film, which had minimal dialogue, received mixed reviews.[64][65] Affleck, who rarely watches his own films,[61] said of Gerry in 2016: "That was an incredible experience. I saw one scene recently out of context at the Telluride Film Festival and I can't believe anyone ever sat through the whole thing. It probably works better as a whole but one scene lifted out – I thought, 'This is unbearable!'"[37] Also in 2002, Affleck starred with Damon and then-girlfriend Summer Phoenix in a West End stage production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth.[18][66][67] Lonergan and Affleck became friends during rehearsals,[68] and Affleck later acted in workshop productions of Lonergan's plays in New York.[69][70]
Personal life[edit]
Relationships and family[edit]
Affleck was introduced to actress Summer Phoenix by her brother, Joaquin, in the late 1990s.[18][148] They began dating in 2000,[149] and acted together in both the 2000 film Committed[150] and a 2002 stage production of This Is Our Youth.[151] The couple became engaged in January 2004[148] and married on June 3, 2006, in Savannah, Georgia.[152] They have two sons born in 2004 and 2007.[153] On August 1, 2017, Phoenix officially filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences",[154] and it was finalized later that year.[155] Affleck has said it was an amicable divorce and that they remain friends.[23]
He has been in a relationship with actress Caylee Cowan since January 2021.[156]
Political views[edit]
In 2008, Affleck filmed an episode of documentary series 4Real, in which he visited the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, and remarked upon the progress they had made due largely to "their own resourcefulness and determination and their character, and not because of the goodness of our collective heart."[157] During the 2016 presidential campaign, Affleck supported Hillary Clinton[33][158] and characterized Donald Trump as "a dangerous fool".[61][159] In 2017, multiple financial contributions to Trump were made by Affleck's production company, which he co-founded with John Powers Middleton. In a statement, Affleck denied involvement: "I had no knowledge of it, was never asked, and never would have authorized it ... The policies of the Trump administration, and the values they represent, are antithetical to everything I believe in."[160]
Sexual harassment allegations[edit]
Affleck has settled two sexual harassment lawsuits out of court for an undisclosed amount.[161]
In 2010, two of his former co-workers from I'm Still Here filed civil lawsuits against Affleck. Amanda White, one of the film's producers, sued Affleck for $2 million with multiple complaints including sexual harassment and breach of oral contract.[162] She detailed numerous "uninvited and unwelcome sexual advances" in the workplace. White alleged that Affleck refused to honor the terms of the production agreement, including her fee, in retaliation.[162]
The film's cinematographer, Magdalena Gorka, sued Affleck for $2.25 million with multiple complaints including intentional infliction of emotional distress and breach of oral contract.[163][164] Gorka alleged that she had been subjected to "routine instances" of sexual harassment by crew members including Antony Langdon, "within the presence and with the active encouragement of Affleck."[163]
Initially, Affleck denied the allegations and threatened to countersue.[165] No countersuits were filed.[161] His lawyer claimed, "Both women left the film in April 2009 and both were refused when they wanted to return", and "there was no mention of sexual harassment before June [2010]."[166] The film's associate producer Nicole Acacio and an unnamed female editor both defended Affleck's conduct on set.[167] The lawsuits were later settled out of court.[168] Both women received credit for their work on the project; no details of any financial settlement were released.[169]
Affleck addressed the allegations in a 2016 interview with The New York Times, stating: "It was settled to the satisfaction of all. I was hurt and upset — I am sure all were — but I am over it. It was an unfortunate situation — mostly for the innocent bystanders of the families of those involved."[170] The allegations and lawsuits attracted scrutiny during the 2016–17 film awards season, when Affleck was recognized for his performance in Manchester by the Sea, which culminated in further controversy following his Best Actor win at the 89th Academy Awards.[171][172][173] The following year, amidst the Me Too movement, Affleck withdrew from presenting the award for Best Actress at the 90th Academy Awards.[174]
In a 2018 interview with the Associated Press, Affleck discussed the lawsuits and allegations in light of the Me Too movement.[175] He characterized his behavior at the time of the lawsuits as defensive and said he has since worked to understand his own culpability.[175] He acknowledged that the set of I'm Still Here was "an unprofessional environment" and that "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 behaved in a way and allowed others to behave in a way that was really unprofessional. And I'm sorry."[175]
Philanthropy[edit]
Affleck has been a vegan since 1995.[176] He has been involved with animal rights campaigns for both People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)[177][178][179] and Farm Sanctuary.[180]
In 2017, Affleck supported the 37th Annual National Veterans Wheelchair Games[181] hosted by Paralyzed Veterans of America. In January 2019, he attended the fourth annual Veterans Awards as a presenter.[182]
In June 2020, Affleck, with his mother Christine, founded a fundraising effort, Stories from Tomorrow. The initiative was co-sponsored by Room to Read, WriteGirl and New Earth, an organization where Affleck is a board member. 'Stories from Tomorrow' matches original writing by children ages 5–18 with celebrities who read their work, which is then presented in video form. The money raised will be used to ensure that children around the world have access to education and food.[183][184][185]