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- The Guardian, Saturday 22 May 2010
He plays the psycho sheriff role with the kind of fish-eyed creepiness that lingers in the mind for days. Photograph: Patrick Fraser for the Guardian
On a hot Saturday afternoon, Casey Affleck comes down a New York street bouncing a ball, looking as rangy and innocent as a teenager, and nothing like Lou Ford, the psychotic sheriff who murders two women in Michael Winterbottom's violent new thriller, The Killer Inside Me. After watching Affleck's performance, I was a little unnerved to meet him. The 34-year-old plays the role with the kind of fish-eyed creepiness that lingers in the mind for days.
"Uh-oh," Affleck says when I mention the eye thing. "Have I done it at lunch?"
To be Ben Affleck's more interesting younger brother seems a particularly sorry designation in life, except that Casey has in the last few years played such good roles, with such quiet integrity, that his reputation as the better actor is established. With a softer version of the Affleck jaw and a round, butter-wouldn't-melt face, he can play against physical type to great effect; as the cop in Gone Baby Gone, as the killer in The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and, in the new film, as the small-town law enforcement officer who can't stop killing women.
Fuss around the film, which was adapted from the 1952 novel by Jim Thompson, centres on two scenes in which Affleck's character beats to death first Jessica Alba, then Kate Hudson, with such sustained, unflinching shots of punching and kicking, and such realistic prosthetics, that Alba is, by the end, a bloody mess and unrecognisable. It is horrific to watch and burdens the film, a stylish and stylised noir, with a weight of experience it can't wholly support. When it showed at Sundance, Alba was rumoured to have walked out of the screening in distress (in fact, she said later, she had to get home because her child was sick) and during the Q&A afterwards a member of the audience heckled the panel.
Affleck, in a wry drawl, says all this smacks of "a good if lazy way of stirring up some interest in the film". What about the heckling? "It sounded like one cranky woman. It didn't sound like a very considered objection. It was knee-jerk hysteria. I think she said, 'How dare you?' Since then, people have been more thoughtful."
The defence of extreme, realistic violence on screen is that it is more honest than movies that downplay and disguise it. "If it wasn't really disturbing, then there'd be something to object to," Affleck says. "There's a million movies like that. This is the opposite. If anything, it compromises the storytelling to dwell on the violence and make it realistic and disturbing; to look at what it's like for the victims."
The story doesn't moralise – Alba's character, a prostitute, reacts to Ford's brutal assaults by falling in love with him in what Affleck calls "one of those very physical experiences where a struggle turns into an embrace". He says it's something with which he is familiar. "Obviously it's not like belting somebody turns into making love, but I have had those kind of experiences where emotions are so confused that it starts as a physical confrontation and then turns into something else." Where a comparably violent film such as Once Were Warriors is documentary-like in its depiction of domestic violence, The Killer Inside Me feels like a more explicit piece of entertainment. "I know what you mean. It's not issue-driven." But, says Affleck, it is less offensive than those aspects of film culture that go uncommented on. "The advertising of films and TV is gross. There's a rating system for films. I think there ought to be a rating system for billboards. I have kids, and there are things I look at where I think, I do not want that image in my head, let alone my kids' heads."
Such as? "Horror films. All those – like Saw. Your average run-of-the-mill PG13 action film, there's blood spattering, or knives. It's all you see. That kind of depiction of violence is all around us. And it does a lot more harm."
Filming the violent scenes wasn't traumatic, he says – there was too much stopping and starting – but it was technically difficult. Affleck was directed to punch within a quarter-inch of Alba's face and was terrified he'd make contact. "Especially after you've done it a bunch of times, you lose accuracy." Eventually, a stunt woman was put in Alba's place. Watching the scene back for the first time was "gruesome", says Affleck, and it's testament to his acting ability that one feels such hostility towards him afterwards. I wonder what his wife, the actor Summer Phoenix, thought of the film.
"She didn't like it."
What did she say? "Um. I think I probably better not speak out of school."
In fact, speaking out of school is something at which Affleck excels. (He once told an interviewer who had glazed over that he was studying "eugenics" at university, which went in the piece without comment.) He has been forthright about his career and the people he works with, and refreshingly ambivalent about the film industry, which took him years to crack after making a run of films with good casts that nonetheless sank: Desert Blue, with Morgan Freeman, Drowning Mona with Bette Midler and Danny DeVito, Lonesome Jim with Steve Buscemi. It was only in 2008, when he was Oscar-nominated for Jesse James and widely praised for Gone Baby Gone, which his brother directed, that he was, at the age of 31, suddenly in the golden zone. Was there a temptation to become a bit of an idiot?
He smiles. "I've always been a bit of an idiot."
Neither of his parents is in showbusiness. The fact that both Affleck brothers got into acting is, he says, due to the influence of a drama teacher at their high school, a man "who was one of those guiding lights, a very, very bright star with a lot of mass and gravitational attraction. A lot of successful working actors came out of this little high school theatre department: me, my brother, Matt [Damon], Max Casella – people who are in a bunch of TV shows."
Affleck grew up in a suburb of Boston. Dennis Lehane, the author of Gone Baby Gone, told me last year he would tease the Afflecks about growing up in a posher part of Boston than he had. Affleck grimaces. "We grew up in a working-class neighbourhood which, I don't know why, these days is a badge of honour. I don't get it. Anyway, my father was a bartender, when he was employed, my mother was a teacher. And I feel fairly certain that Dennis Lehane – although I'm loth to enter into some battle over who had the more hardscrabble upbringing – I do not think that where he grew up was any tougher than where we grew up."
Casey had been working for several years when, in 1997, his brother became famous after winning a screenwriting Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting. One imagines the Affleck name became an albatross, if not at that moment, then seven years later when Ben made Jersey Girl. But the younger actor says he has never felt his professional fortunes to be indexed to his brother's.
"Let's see, I got my first movie when I was 18 or something, and no one really knew either one of us. When he did Good Will Hunting, I'd worked enough that people didn't think, 'This is someone who's just working the family name', or whatever. When you sit in a room with people who are trying to decide whether or not you should be in their movie, they are making a creative decision. Most directors are thinking, 'Who can I cast that is going to make my movie really good?' They're not going to say, 'I'm going to cast this guy because he's related to someone else.' "
Now that he's a successful director, Ben routinely says in interviews that Casey is the better actor. Affleck rolls his eyes. "I think it's a cute thing to say. He's not too worried about comparisons."
It has helped perhaps that Affleck is not cut from the same cloth as his brother, and looks significantly different, although, he says, "It's probably an advantage in film, as it is in life, to be conventionally good-looking." In those years of his 20s, with a series of failed films behind him, did he get discouraged and think of packing it in?
"Definitely. I still think that today. But it wasn't discouragement. And it wasn't in my 20s. It was earlier, after the first movie or two, when I thought, 'Ah, is this really what I want to do?' And usually around about the eighth or ninth week of any movie, I start to think, right, this is definitely going to be my last one. But it is like taking your medicine. It doesn't always taste good, but if I don't do it, I feel worse. "
Affleck wanted to work with Winterbottom because he admires the way the director moves between genres, something he aspires to in his own career – "I'd like to try doing bigger movies. I'd love to do a movie in another language. I want to try it all." If he has a reservation about The Killer Inside Me, it is, perhaps, that the British director had an insufficient sense of place. (It is set in a small town in Texas in the early 50s.) "It did seem to me that the director ought to have a pretty good handle on what role the culture of that place and time is playing in the story. I don't know if he cared quite so much about that."
But he loved the way Winterbottom works. "No frills, no fat. Just a laser-beam focus on the point of sale: what is happening in front of the camera."
Given the build-up, one imagines he might be nervous about the film's release, and especially the audience reaction to his character. If people come away not understanding why the killer did what he did, then "it's a failure of the film", Affleck says. Through flashbacks to Ford's rotten childhood, the film does establish a motivation. But surely there's a point beyond which a psychopath can't be understood?
"This is almost entirely pure speculation, but if you were to talk to actual serial killers about the reasons they did things, it's never, 'I couldn't control myself.' It's like, 'He wouldn't stop his dog from barking, every day.' There's a reason... It's usually mundane. I'm sure there's the rare case of someone who just kills to kill. But that is a darkness beyond me."
Affleck has just spent two years directing a small film, and he has writing projects on the go. The excitement of that Oscars year dimmed pretty quickly, he says. "Any kind of increased value of my stock, so to speak, has come back down since then." He didn't work for a couple of years because he couldn't find anything he liked. And now – he doesn't say this regretfully – he is "back to where I've always been, which is scratching around to find great things that have been discarded, some diamond in the rough I can cling to and try to get done." He picks up his ball, and exits, bouncing.
• The Killer Inside Me is released on 4 June.