Ben Affleck has revealed a piece of early career history he’d apparently kept quiet for three decades: he appeared in the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer film, and his performance was so bad that director Fran Rubel Kuzui hired someone else to say his one line.
Appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden to promote his film Air, the 50-year-old Oscar winner was asked whether he’d ever been cut from a project. After joking about teenage jobs lost to poor punctuality, he arrived at Buffy. He played a basketball player with a single line — directed at a werewolf who runs through the gym during a game: “Hey man, take it.” He thought he nailed it. He felt “authentically afraid.” He was feeling it.
“And then I went and saw the movie with friends,” Affleck said, “and I sounded very different.” The realisation: they’d re-recorded his voice entirely. “I was so bad. They needed me to be in the scene, but the director obviously [was like], ‘I can’t hear the voice again!’ They had to pay someone to come in and say, ‘Hey man, take it.’ Because apparently, I couldn’t say that convincingly enough.”
Corden played the clip for the studio audience, and Affleck got to hear the dubbing fresh. His reaction: “Sounds like Chris Tucker!” Not every acting origin story involves having your voice replaced in a cult horror-comedy about a vampire slayer, but this one does. The bar for career improvement has rarely been set so specifically.
Leave a Reply