JERSEY GIRL
Q&A with Ben Affleck		 Search all of phase9.tv






With Ben Affleck who plays Ollie Trinke in JERSEY GIRL

There have been reports of you being quite ill lately. How are you now?

BEN AFFLECK: I was hospitalised. I got sick, I had bronchitis just as a result of being too stupid to quit smoking. I get this sort of bronchitis, lung infection thing every 18 months or so and I felt it coming on. I went to get some antibiotics, but I was on holiday up in New Hampshire and by the time I came back my lungs were feeling really bad and I was running a fever and I had some muscle aches in my back, so they said maybe they should check for meningitis too. They had to give me a spinal tap, so I did that, and they told me that 5% of people have this reaction where the spinal tap leaks a little bit and you leak your cerebral spinal fluid and get these terrible headaches. I found out I didn’t have meningitis thank God, and I actually recovered from the bronchitis and the flu, but then I did have this side effect with the fluid leaking out. I had these terrible headaches, so I had to go back into the hospital and have this thing called a blood patch. Pregnant women know about it because they sometimes have it after they give you an epidural. It means injecting blood into the same area so that it will clot, so I had to go back in and have it done, and it didn’t work, and I had to have it done again. So I recovered from bronchitis but it left me racked with pain in my spine.

The other headlines have concerned you and co-star, and former girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s a strange thing, and it really is a shame in some ways that my relationship with Jennifer really overshadowed a movie that I’m really proud of. There’s a prurient interest that undermines your telling a story because that depends on asking an audience to suspend their disbelief. That’s made harder if you’re bombarded with images of people in the movie as other people than who you’re trying to convince them you are.

Do you think this is an occupational hazard, in this celebrity-obsessed age?

BEN AFFLECK: I guess so. It’s certainly a problem if your job is to convince people that you’re somebody else, it really gets in the way. If you’re a sports star like David Beckham it might be distracting and make it harder for him to play soccer, but it doesn’t fundamentally change your ability to appreciate the thing that he became famous for in the first place. But with acting it does, which is really the frustrating nature of that particular vicious circle.

How did you approach playing a dad in JERSEY GIRL?

BEN AFFLECK: I had to do a lot of imagining, and talked to friends who had kids. What I discovered when I talked to them is the openness with which they expressed how parenthood had changed them. It surprised me, because they would be these tough guys I grew up with. As far as the dynamic with [my screen daughter] Raquel Castro, I kind of relied on her. She has a father, I don’t have a daughter. So I took the cues from her about how that relationship might be, and she was great about it, really helpful.

Have you witnessed the change a child makes in your director, Kevin Smith?

BEN AFFLECK: I think the story came out of his own ruminations on what it would be like if he had to raise a daughter by himself. Would he be up to it? What would he do? For career driven people that’s the central preoccupation of your life. You’re trying to make money, or achieve some goals that you have set out for yourself and then all of a sudden you’re sideswiped by this whole other aspect of life – a family. What my character realises is that your family, as well as what sort of person you actually want to be, are the things that are really important. It’s about trying to become a man I guess.

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