Ben Affleck Is a Genius

For years, I’ve been telling people about The Time I Saw Ben Affleck.

I was at the gym, trudging listlessly along on an elliptical trainer, when out of the corner of my eye I observed a tall, dark-haired man in an orange T-shirt mounting the machine next to mine. My dominant emotion, at that moment, was mild annoyance: The club’s cardio area was almost entirely empty, and I’ve always believed that unacquainted exercisers should afford each other at least a little personal space, a buffer of, say, one unoccupied treadmill between them, if at all possible, for the sake of politeness.

But I didn’t think too much more about it until my roommate B. appeared approximately five minutes later, fresh from an oddly abbreviated circuit-training session, and proceeded to lean all over my console, asking an endless series of inane questions and casting lots of intense glances at the adjacent machine. Even then, I didn’t turn my head; I just figured that the guy next to me was exercising in a manner that my roommate for whatever reason found riveting.

It was only later, after we’d left the gym and returned to our apartment, that I learned of my brush with greatness.

“We just saw Ben Affleck,” B. informed our next-door neighbor.

“We did?” I asked, incredulous. “Where?”

“At the gym,” he said, speaking slowly. “You were right next to him. You seriously didn’t notice?”

No, I hadn’t. I’d spent, it seems, the better part of an hour in very close proximity to one of Boston’s biggest celebrities—a man who was, back then in 1999, still thought of as something of a golden boy—and I didn’t even see him at all.

And that brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point: I’m not sure anyone ever really sees Ben Affleck. Not then, and not now. Sure, he’s been in our faces for what feels like forever—at the movies, in the tabloids, stumping for politicians, partying with strippers, in rehab, out of rehab, rooting for his darling Red Sox—but he’s simply too famous. In short order, he blew right past celebrity and became a caricature—of some oafy frat boy, at once endearing and entirely pitiable. And the real actor inside (to say nothing of the person) was rendered all but invisible.

To find out how Affleck first began his acting career, go on to the next page...