Before Ben Affleck became a two-time Oscar-winning industry heavyweight, an early career role taught him the importance of the worker’s inalienable right to call off sick from work.
While promoting his latest film and collaboration with Matt Damon, Netflix’s The Rip, the multi-hyphenate recalled shooting a key Armageddon scene opposite star Bruce Willis while extremely ill.
“When we shot that scene, I had food poisoning,” he told Fox 32 Chicago’s Jake Hamilton in a recent interview. “And I wasn’t an experienced enough actor at that point to know that you can just pick up the phone and be like, ‘I’m too sick to work today.’ I was like, ‘I better come in.’ And I went in there, and I was literally — it’s the only time it’s ever happened in my life — vomiting between takes.”
“They had a garbage can and I was [mimics hurling]. And it probably made the scene better,” he continued with a laugh, adding that he didn’t choose to persevere out of perceived “martyrdom” or extreme dedication to the 1998 film’s emotional farewell sequence. (The heartrending denouement sees Willis’ Harry sacrifice himself to detonate the earth-ending asteroid so that Affleck’s A.J. can build a life with his daughter, played by Liv Tyler.)
Affleck reminisced on the disaster film, which granted him the opportunity to work with Billy Bob Thornton, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson and Willis, whom he described as being “really nice to everybody.”
“I actually saw Steve Buscemi last night at the premiere for The Rip, and we were reminiscing about that movie and saying about how that was the weirdest, kind of wonderful, strange, otherworldly movie experience,” the Gone Girl actor said.
Armageddon — directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and co-written by Tony Gilroy and J.J. Abrams (among others) — went on to become the highest-grossing film of 1998.
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