“They dug out two stages of Disney for huge asteroid craters, and I didn’t even think about the fact that the basic premise of the movie was totally absurd,” he said. “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.”
But, perhaps resentfully, Affleck also recalls being forced to get “sexy” for the movie now that he was a marquee male lead and considered to be an all-around heartthrob thanks to “Good Will Hunting” (which won him and Damon a Best Screenplay Oscar). Related Ben Affleck Questions Netflix’s ‘Assembly Line’ Filmmaking Process: ‘How Do You Make 50 Great Movies?’ Ben Affleck and Matt Damon Launch Production Company Designed to Increase Streaming Profits for Artists Related 2023 Oscars: ‘Avatar’ Is the One to Beat in Visual Effects 17 HBO and HBO Max Original Series to Get Excited About in 2023“I was a little naive about the opinions people would form about me. Or the way in which Michael [Bay] and Jerry [Bruckheimer]’s focus on aesthetics and ‘You guys gotta go to the tanning bed!’ he said, recalling some of the specific regimen he had to undergo for the role. “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.” He added that the film is one that “my kids have watched and they’ll kind of all admit to liking, 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.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
