Both Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have been pretty quiet lately. And by lately I mean like no pap shots in almost two weeks. This doesn’t signify anything and I should probably stop mentioning her when I mention him, and vice versa, but this habit has been and will continue to be hard to break.
Even though he hasn’t been photographed, it’s not like there hasn’t been any news about Ben. In March he’ll be at SXSW to premiere The Accountant 2 ahead of its wide release in April and Vanity Fair just had an exclusive first look at the movie this week. He and Jon Bernthal are both featured because this time around, the brothers’ relationship is front and centre and in real time, as opposed to flashbacks the way it was in the first film. I hate myself for what I’m about to say next… which is that in the third shot of the carousel below, where they’re both holding guns, clearly on some kind of mission, it’s kinda hot.
As Sarah has mentioned many times before, The Accountant has become kind of a cult favourite. As Ben acknowledges himself, “It was a movie that I found that I would hear about from people. It was a movie that stuck around, that people would talk about and say, ‘Oh, hey, I like The Accountant.’ And there seemed to be a lot of goodwill towards it.”
He’s not wrong – I really enjoyed The Accountant, I remember streaming it on my iPad at the nail bar and looking up, 90 minutes later, almost annoyed that the appointment was over because I’d lost myself in it. So I’m looking forward to the sequel…and this press tour. It’ll be his first since, you know, the end of Bennifer. And it’ll be interesting, for gossip, to see how he handles it. As we already saw, in the weeks and months following the announcement last year that he and JLo were done, Ben seemed to be performing happiness in the most extra way possible, as if to send a message, loud and clear, that she was killing his joy. Because if a man is miserable, there must be a bitch in his life!
The Bennifer sequel did not hold up, but sequels seem to be Ben’s thing lately because in addition to The Accountant, the other sequel he’s been making headlines for is his latest Dunkin’ commercial for the Super Bowl. Instead of Matt Damon, he brought in his brother, Casey who apparently revived his character from the Oceans Eleven movies. I’ve included the full length, six minute version at the end of this post and there are all kinds of cameos but the star here is Jeremy Strong – and I don’t mean the part where he’s bean-bathing himself. The Paul Revere bit at the end is, indeed, hilarious. Still…
You’ll recall, the DunKings thing started last year, when Ben recruited his own then-wife, JLo, and built the entire theme around her because he and the DunKings were auditioning to be on her album. You know, the album he was so f-cking embarrassed about. So embarrassed that he co-produced both promotional films in support of it. The internet narratives loves to overlook that part of it when they continue pushing the idea that he was so mortified by her, that he was resistant to her spotlight, that he just wanted to live quietly without the attention, but she was too thirsty to respect his wishes. As if she was the one who forced his hand on this DunKings idea that he AND his company, Artists’ Equity, were benefiting from. Her fame was convenient to him until it wasn’t.
Here's Ben in LA a couple of weeks ago.
