Ben Affleck Was Told To Fix His Teeth And ‘Be Sexy’ For ‘Armageddon’
Ben Affleck had to get hunky and get his chompers fixed, as suggested by filmmakers before appearing in the 1998 sci-fi flick Armageddon.
The Tender Bar star was recently interviewed by his good friend Matt Damon yesterday (January 11) for Entertainment Weekly, and during their chat, the two went over Ben’s impressive catalog of movies. Affleck, 49, reflected on his process for starring in the box-office hit film (earning $553.7 million) alongside Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton.
“I was a little naive about the opinions people would form about me,” Ben shared. “Or Michael [Bay] and Jerry [Bruckheimer]’s focus on aesthetics, like, ‘You guys gotta go to the tanning bed!’ They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that? ‘Go to the gym!’ Running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff, and it just turned out to be a long-form version of one of those male topless calendars, in a garage, carrying a tire, kind of greased up.”
In Armageddon, Affleck played an oil driller part of a team recruited by NASA to help them stop an asteroid from hurling towards Earth. “Michael had a vision of a glistening male torso in the oil, and he was like, ‘That’s going to go in the trailer and sell tickets!’ And you know, what can you say?” Ben continued. Referring to his 1997 rom-com, he added, “We could have made, I think, 400 Chasing Amy‘s for what we made Armageddon for.”
“It’s funny because that’s the one movie of mine that my kids have watched and they’ll kind of all admit to liking,” the actor admitted of his three children, who he shares with ex Jennifer Garner. “Even though they relentlessly mock it and me. ‘What are you, driving a tank on the moon?’ But they had fun, you know what I mean? They won’t even watch The Town. So, there you have it.”
Affleck hilariously pointed out about Armageddon: “Why are they training oil drillers to be astronauts rather than astronauts to be oil drillers? You would think the learning curve would be somewhat more steep on the oil-drillers-to-astronauts route. But it was fun and the right time. It’s funny, Bruce dropped out of a movie, and as the deal for dropping out of this movie that wasn’t working is that we get to put you in two movies, and they put him in Armageddon and The Sixth Sense.”
GALLERY: Bennifer 20 Years Ago To Now
