Ben Affleck Thought Blake Lively Was Just Some ‘Blonde Girl’ Before Her Audition for ‘The Town’
Ben Affleck was very impressed by Blake Lively’s audition for The Town. But what Affleck didn’t know at the time was that she was already pretty famous in her own right.
Ben Affleck’s first impression of Blake Lively
Affleck didn’t know what to expect from Lively for The Town. But while casting her role, there weren’t any other actors giving him the performance he was looking for.
“The whole movie kind of hinges in a lot of ways on her performance, and I knew it was going to be the hardest part to cast,” Affleck said in a 2010 interview with Esquire.
Lively had already been an accomplished actor by the time she screened for The Town. She starred in comedies like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and was the lead in Gossip Girl. But Affleck had little to no knowledge of Lively’s onscreen work. Although her looks already stood out to Affleck, Affleck was immediately floored by her audition.
“This girl came in, and no one had said to me beforehand, ‘Hey, look for this person’,” he said. “And obviously she was really attractive, and so I thought, ‘Oh, here comes some blonde girl’. She came in, did one reading, and just crushed it.”
“I was sort of stunned,” he added. “I said, ‘Jeez, you know, that was really f***ing good. Who are you?’ She didn’t mention that she was on a television show.”
From that point on, Affleck not only had high hopes for Lively’s Town performance. He also had high hopes for his career and joked that he wanted to be credited for giving Lively her big break.
“I just said, ‘Look, there’s no alternative. I don’t have a second choice.’ I want to be on the record because I think she’s really going to blow up, and I want to look like the smart guy,” he said. “I didn’t quite discover her, but at least I want to say I bought the stock when it wasn’t $500 a share.”
How Blake Lively beat out her competition in ‘The Town’
After Lively’s impressive performance, Affleck needed to know how she managed to capture her Town character the way she did. But it wasn’t as easy as Lively might’ve made it seem. It turned out that a lot of preparation was involved to make The Town role Lively’s own.
“I was like, ‘How did you learn this Boston accent? How did you learn all of this stuff?’ Which I thought was hard to get because I had been doing readings with all of these actresses in New York and LA, and it was just hard to find the right person,” Affleck told Lively on Interview. “You were by far the best, and when I asked you how you got everything down, it turned out that you had tried to work with this one dialect coach, and then tried another one, and then just started doing all of this incredibly thorough, diligent, independent research on your own — seeking out people who spoke the way your character does, seeking out people whose own life experiences you could draw upon.”
But it helped that the Green Lantern star understood embodying her character was about more than just adopting a Boston accent.
“Well, the accent you can always work on, but it was the heart of the character that I felt like I had to capture,” she said. “You can look at her as a bad person, or you can look at her as a good person who has been put in certain circumstances and does what she needs to do to get by. But whereas in a story she might be considered the bad guy, I just don’t believe that things are that simple in life.”
