Ben Affleck Admitted His ‘Most Humiliating’ Role Was in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’

Ben Affleck has had many celebrated roles, but one early part didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of his career. Shortly after Affleck moved to Los Angeles, he booked a part in the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While Affleck thought he did a good job, the director apparently did not agree. When Affleck watched the film back, he felt humiliated.

Ben Affleck said his role in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ was humiliating

Early in his career, Affleck booked a role in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was a very small part, but still a speaking role.

“The most humiliating thing was in one of my early parts, I got one line,” he said on The Late Late Show With James Corden. “I had just moved out to L.A., I got a line in a movie and I was playing a basketball player.”

He did multiple takes of the scene, but he thought director Fran Rubel Kuzui was just being thorough. When he watched the movie in theaters, though, he realized that the problem was with him.

“And then I went and saw the movie with some friends… and I sounded very different,” he said. “I realized right then that they re-recorded my lines. 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 well-convincingly enough.”

Luckily, Affleck has improved as an actor since his part in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

The film suffered, though not because of Affleck

Even if Affleck had flawlessly delivered the line, it wouldn’t have saved the film. Buffy the Vampire Slayer received generally negative reviews. It has an approval rating of just 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, though it did gross over $16 million on a $7 million budget. 

Joss Whedon, who wrote the film, later turned it into the 1997 television series of the same name. The series was far more successful than the film.

Ben Affleck said his role in ‘Gigli’ wasn’t as bad as the early gig

Another one of Affleck’s less successful roles is more well-known. In 2003, he starred in the critically panned Gigli with Jennifer Lopez. Affleck said he didn’t feel nearly as embarrassed about this film even though he acknowledged that it didn’t work.

“[Gigli] didn’t work and we did five weeks of reshoots, which we knew were not gonna work,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It was a movie that didn’t work … Interestingly, I learned more about directing on that movie than anything else because Marty [Brest] is a brilliant director, really gifted. It’s not like it’s worse than all … there’s a bunch of horrible movies and in terms of losing money, I’ve had five movies — at least! — that have lost more money than Gigli has.”

For Affleck, the benefit of Gigli was that it pushed him to become a director.