Above suspicion

Adding to the anticipatory build-up was the casting, especially in the case of Affleck. For as different as he may be from the character of Nick, they share the ignominious distinction of being alternately media darlings and targets of public scorn. Nick’s crime? Possibly uxoricide. Affleck’s? A run of iffy films a decade ago and putting the yang in Bennifer.

“There’s nothing really about this guy or character that I feel connected to personally,” Affleck said. “Except that I have definitely felt as though I was looking at a version of my life that I didn’t recognise through the prism of the media.”

Affleck shows up to chat in crisp jeans, a pristine button-down and a black leather jacket. Faint red scratches, courtesy of his 5-year-old middle child, Seraphina, line his nose. Earlier in the day, he joined the ALS ice bucket challenge, shooting a short video that ends with him pulling his wife, Jennifer Garner, into their pool as their daughters giggle riotously off camera.

As he talks — about directing, acting, American solipsism, storied filmmakers, climate change, celebrity culture, money in politics, his non-profit group the Eastern Congo Initiative — Affleck grows increasingly animated. His speech, liberally peppered with GRE-worthy words, quickens, and he shifts in his seat, arms flying to emphasise various points, before eventually stretching his 6-foot-2 self sideways along a chaise.

Affleck is in an enviable position these days, his directorial trifecta — Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo — having earned him both critical praise and a second Oscar (for Argo, which won best picture in 2013). He is currently working on a screen adaptation of Live by Night by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the novel Gone Baby Gone, and the fourth season of HBO’s Project Greenlight with Matt Damon. Affleck also has his pick of acting roles, which include playing Batman (which in turn triggered some Internet howls), and working on Gone Girl.
Still, in the well-worn telling of his 20-year Hollywood career, what Affleck calls “the three-act structure” foisted upon him has proved near impossible to shake.

It goes like this:
Act 1. After a series of well-received indie roles, in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused and Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and Chasing Amy, Affleck becomes Hollywood royalty after he and his pal Damon win a screenwriting Oscar for Good Will Hunting (1997).
Act 2. He appears in a series of box office and critical stinkers — Daredevil, Gigli, Jersey Girl — becomes engaged to Jennifer Lopez and is swiftly anointed, among a slew of nasty things, the “the world’s most overexposed actor”.

Act 3. Affleck marries Hollywood’s equivalent of the girl next door in 2005, directs three good movies in a row and wins Tinsel Town’s top prize.
All of which helped make him the perfect person to play Nick Dunne.

Fincher said that despite his fleetingly wanting a younger actor — Nick is 34 in the book; Affleck just turned 42 — a certain inevitability hung over casting Affleck as Nick, whose life and marriage nose-dive after he loses his magazine job and moves with Amy from their Brooklyn home to his pokey Missouri hometown.

In Gone Girl, after Amy disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, leaving a trail of damning clues, Nick is both publicly indicted and exculpated, and during much of the story it is unclear just how dirty his hands are.

“The sense is: ‘Here is this guy who may have killed his wife, but also I would love to grab a cheeseburger with him, and is that weird?’,” said Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay. “There’s very few actors who have that aloofness, that little bit of arrogance, and that inherent likability.”

The real work, Affleck said, lay in truly letting go of the “tropes of leading-man-isms”. Playing Nick Dunne for Fincher meant abandoning vanity and showing the soft underbelly of a flawed man.

Throughout the film, Affleck shows a raw, emotionally exposed side that seems deeper and more textured than some of his other more guarded, taciturn roles. “I think it’s his best performance,” said Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival.

In the meantime, Affleck is finishing production of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in Detroit. “I’m having a blast,” he said. Written by Chris Terrio, who wrote Argo, the film, Affleck said, “is really unique to the genre and really smart”. (Co-starring Henry Cavill, it pairs what are arguably the two best cleft chins of our time.)

The only cloud seems to be a receding one. He and Matt Damon had been working on a biopic of the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, but abandoned it after another Bulger film starring Johnny Depp got the go-ahead. While Affleck said that he and Damon were initially crestfallen at the news, they had since, he said, taken it in stride.
“The world is more naturally full of nos than they are with yeses,” Affleck said.     NYT