Christian Bale Reignited Casey Affleck’s Passion for Acting

Christian Bale worked alongside actor Casey Affleck in the 2013 feature Out of the Furnace. What Affleck thought might’ve been just another acting job turned out to be a life-changing opportunity thanks to his co-star.

Casey Affleck became disillusioned with acting before working with Christian Bale

Affleck’s 2013 feature Out of the Furnace might’ve breathed new life into him. He played Bale’s younger brother in the mystery crime thriller, which seemed to remind him of what he enjoyed about acting in the first place.

Like his older brother Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck strived to become an actor from a young age. Although he found considerable success in the field, he didn’t consider it very rewarding work for a few years. The financial benefits of his acting career didn’t compensate for the satisfaction that he was seeking in the business.

“I got sucked into doing movies because now I was depending on it for my livelihood, and I had an apartment in New York and I started to have things I had to pay for, so there was a period where I did some movies that I had no interest in. It was a job, and it started to become not so fun — movies like Drowning Mona and Soul Survivors that I just did,” Affleck once told The New York Times.

Even the movies that he did have fun in, like the Ocean’s franchise, didn’t offer him the excitement he was searching for.

“Then I started doing the Ocean movies. Those were fun, but also a lot of time spent being, like, 100 feet away from the camera in the background while George [Clooney] and Brad [Pitt] were in the foreground. That was sort of a great, fun social experience, but not all that exciting as an actor,” Affleck said.

But seeing acting veteran Christian Bale’s performance up close and personal helped reinvigorate his waning passion for filmmaking,

“What I saw Christian doing was, I felt like, some of the best acting that I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “You know when you sort of forget what you like about movies, and then you see a movie again that reminds you of why you fell in love with them in the first place? That was the experience.”

“I didn’t even realize it, but I had become disillusioned with acting a little bit. What he was doing made me think, Oh, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I wanted to do that,” he added.

Why Casey Affleck didn’t want to become an A-list actor like his brother

Affleck was well aware that he hadn’t reached the kind of heights in his career that his brother Ben and friend Matt Damon had at one point. But at the same time, it wasn’t a level of fame that the younger Affleck wanted to chase. He asserted that he was completely turned off by that aspect of celebrity culture.

“Just the disingenuousness of it — just the putting on the fitted shirt and mugging at the photo shoot. That sort of performing-as-yourself aspect of it, I wasn’t good at it. I’m not above it — there are people who are peers who have basically built a whole career out of it, and I wish that I could make a better living doing this and I didn’t have to go job to job,” Affleck said.

Affleck considered himself fortunate that his life didn’t change all that much afterGood Will Hunting. His older brother Ben and Matt Damon both achieved their A-list status thanks to the film, which won them their first Oscars. But the film’s effects on the younger Affleck’s career were much tamer in comparison, which he didn’t have a problem with.

“My life hasn’t really changed all that much, to be honest,” Affleck once told Boston. “I’d been in movies before. My role in To Die For was bigger than my role in Good Will Hunting. I would just see people walking around reading the fairy tale, and I knew that I was a character in here somewhere. Parts of my life were now part of pop culture and public life. As a topic, [celebrity is] like poison ivy: If you go anywhere near it, you get some of it on you. You can’t talk about it without saying something that’s wrong, or saying something that can be misconstrued or seemingly ungrateful. I try to avoid the topic. I mean, I do kind of live a normal life.”