Ben Affleck’s been burning some bridges of late. He recently opened up about how he was good with being “Sad Batman” and being memed into oblivion but then followed up with how he disliked the Justice League filming experience so much that it’s the “nadir” of his career. Now he’s unloading on his Armageddon filming experience as well while taking aim at the Michael Bay aesthetic. Bay, of course, tends to shoot blockbusters in the same way that he shoots a Victoria’s Secret commercial, only with a lot of explosions in the mix.
Affleck’s currently promoting The Tender Bar (directed by George Clooney) and sat down to speak with old friend and frequent co-worker Matt Damon about the Bay (and Jerry Bruckheimer) treatment, which (no surprise here) is all about the sexiness, even while saving planet Earth in Armageddon. He’s likening the experience to being in a beefcake calendar:
“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. 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? We could have made, I think, 400 ‘Chasing Amys’ for what we made ‘Armageddon’ for.”
In other words, Michael Bay might be an equal-opportunity objectifier, if one goes back to thinking about the reflections that Transformers star Megan Fox had about her bikini-clad Bad Boys II appearance. And it appears as though Affleck’s still getting some grief about Armageddon, but it’s mostly coming from his kids. He says that the Affleck-Garner children do enjoy the movie, but “they relentlessly mock it” (“What are you, driving a tank on the moon?”) while not agreeing (yet) to view The Town. Give them time.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)