US Edition 
Casey Affleck's time to shine
While his big brother Ben boasts a high-profile Hollywood career, Casey Affleck has always preferred a low-key approach to the film industry. It has paid off: his latest film looks set to make a leading man out of him at last. By Sheryl Garratt
Casey Affleck strolls up to the LA coffee shop where we have agreed to meet (in the affluent Los Feliz area), bang on time. He is dressed down in torn, patched jeans and a well-worn T-shirt, but none the less he oozes charisma, his face breaking out into a familiar, slightly lopsided grin when I wave hello. As he heads back into the coffee shop to queue for his apple juice and bagel, the man at the next table leans over to me, slightly awestruck. 'Man, I recognised him as soon as he spoke,' he declares. 'That guy is shining right now, he's shining so bright.'
Which seems to be the consensus. After years of taking minor roles in huge films such as Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen or bigger roles in smaller independent movies such as Gus Van Sant's Gerry or Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim, the 33-year-old actor is suddenly being celebrated as Hollywood's next big thing.
In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - an elegiac and actually rather beautiful western once you get used to its slow pace - Affleck's star-struck Ford steals the film from Brad Pitt's jaded, cynical outlaw James. Playing Ford sympathetically as a creepy, awkward but also ambitious adolescent who tries to emulate his hero but is ultimately trapped into killing him, his performance was rightly nominated for an Oscar in February.
And now with the dark, gritty, Boston-based thriller Gone Baby Gone, Affleck has finally left the sidekick roles behind to play the tough leading man - while retaining enough emotional depth to make the film's morally ambiguous ending work.
Most recent media profiles therefore start with a declaration that this is definitely his year, something Affleck himself doesn't take too seriously. 'If this is my year, I sort of wonder who owned the last 32 years, you know what I mean?' he laughs. 'Every so often my Chinese year comes around, the year of the rabbit. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect my life in any way. This is not so dissimilar. But it was really nice to be part of two movies that I was proud of, so I feel pretty grateful.'
Gone Baby Gone was adapted by Casey's big brother Ben, 36, from the novel by Dennis Lehane, whose Mystic River had already made a successful migration to the big screen. Ben also makes a credible debut as a director, handling veteran actors such as Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman and a dark, difficult storyline about child abduction and abuse with career-changing assurance.
While they were filming Jesse James, the director Andrew Dominic had copies of newspapers from the 1880s delivered to the actors each day. 'It was a great idea,' Affleck says, 'because it helped get you familiar with the language, got you thinking about what people were doing at the time, what was in the news, what the advertisements were - the hair tonics that people were using and stuff.'
For Gone Baby Gone, though, he needed no such preparation - he was going home. The Afflecks grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just over the river from Boston, in a working-class neighbourhood very similar to the one used in the film.
'It was all pretty familiar: the homes, the attitudes, the accent, the kinds of jobs people have. Sometimes you do a movie and you're shuttled to some neighbourhood you've never been to, and you can't even get a sense of it because there are movie trucks everywhere and people have been asked to leave for the day or stay inside their houses. That wasn't the case here. In a way it felt like we were making a movie about our childhood.' Since the film is essentially about child abuse, he adds a hasty qualification. 'Even though it had nothing to do with our own childhoods, of course.'
Cambridge is a densely populated part of Greater Boston that is home to two of the United States' greatest universities (Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), but also has nearly 13 per cent of its population living below the poverty line. 'In many ways, it's the cradle of political correctness,' Affleck says, explaining that the environment he grew up in was unusually well integrated, both racially and economically.
'We were a working-class family in a working-class neighbourhood, but it wasn't like living in South Central [Los Angeles] where there's only one type of person. I had friends who were upper-middle class and lived on the other side of town, and I had friends who didn't have as much as we did. I've always found it kind of easy to slip back and forth between the two worlds.'
None the less, academia didn't figure large in the Afflecks' lives. 'My father was a janitor at Harvard,' he shrugs. 'That was one of his many jobs. Otherwise we didn't have anything to do with it, apart from walking across the yards sometimes.'
Having recovered from his own problems with drink, their father is now a social worker helping people with addictions. But when Ben and Casey were children he was a struggling actor, working a series of temporary jobs. Their mother was a public school teacher. 'That's public school in our sense, not yours,' Affleck clarifies. 'Paid nothing, bad schools, under-funded.'
After their parents separated, the two boys were often left together while their mother worked, which is why they have always been close. 'We would spend all of our time together, pretty much. Obviously at school we were in different grades, but we had the same friends and we would just play out in the neighbourhood.'
Ben has said that he cast his brother in Gone Baby Gone because Casey knew the environment, the accent, 'and because we could afford him'. On set they could talk in the shorthand of people who had a shared emotional history, but both men admit this also led to fights - for which Casey shoulders the blame in his usual laidback fashion.
'We felt so comfortable with one another that we would second-guess each other when it was not the right time. Sometimes even if you don't agree with someone, you have to let them try whatever it was they were going to try, and if the boundaries between director and actor are a little more rigid, you have no choice. So there were probably one or two instances where I said, "What the hell are you doing? That's not a good choice", and I shouldn't have. But he conducted himself very well.'
Through a friend of their mother's, who was a casting director, the two boys did small acting jobs throughout their childhood. They featured in ads and trailers for a local weather station, and were extras in Field of Dreams. Casey played Kevin Bacon's little brother in the 1988 film Lemon Sky, while Ben featured in two seasons of a children's educational television show called The Voyage of the Mimi, which was shot in Mexico.
The boys and their mother spent nearly a year there, travelling around the country when Ben wasn't needed on set, and Casey returned to Boston with fairly fluent Spanish (something used to good effect in Ocean's Thirteen, when his character is sent to work a scam in a Mexican factory and ends up leading the workers out on strike instead).
But both say this wasn't what inspired them to act. Like their friend Matt Damon, who lived in the same neighbourhood and went to the same big, mixed state school, they were drawn into the theatre group run by a talented teacher called Jerry Specca. Though uncomfortable when conversation steers towards private matters, Casey talks about Specca with genuine enthusiasm.
'It's not so often that you find a teacher who actually excites kids, and makes them want to do something. At my high school it was all a grind, and you were just trying to stay out of trouble, get a passing grade and then get on with what you were really interested in. Then you walk into a class and there's someone who asks more of you than any other teacher ever has, who is extremely demanding, yet at the same time, you just love them.
'It wasn't necessarily that he had the most brilliant thoughts about acting, it was just that he turned kids on, excited us about the subject. And if you can get a kid really interested in something, the whole world opens up to them. He treated us all like adults, and it was a different feeling to any other we'd had in any other classroom. It made us all want to work hard.'
Affleck went straight to Los Angeles after school, 'half looking for an agent and trying to be an actor, half sort of being 18 and living in Los Angeles, running around and exploring things,' but then he stumbled into a role as one of the teenage hoodlums enticed by Nicole Kidman's ambitious television weather presenter to murder her lumpen husband Matt Dillon in Gus Van Sant's brilliant 1995 satire To Die For.
The kind of person who seems to keep his friends for life ('Doesn't everyone?' he asks), Affleck has worked with Van Sant several times since, and has remained close to his co-star in To Die For, Joaquin Phoenix - so close, in fact, that he married Joaquin's sister, Summer, in 2006, after a long relationship.
Damon, too, has remained a friend, although a busy one. 'Matt just works and works. He doesn't take a break from it.'
They have worked together regularly. In 2002 Affleck and Summer Phoenix came to the Garrick Theatre in London to star alongside Damon in Kenneth Lonergan's play This is Our Youth. He speaks fondly of this time in the West End, especially of his excitement when Tom Stoppard - a hero since Affleck first saw his play Dogg's Hamlet performed as part of a school drama competition - came backstage. 'I've never really been star-struck, but that was pretty amazing.'
Gone Baby Gone has already been released across the rest of the world, but the British release was postponed when real life intervened. The film is about the search for a missing four-year-old, Amanda McCready, who was left asleep in her room while her mother slipped out to watch television with a neighbour. While she is out the child vanishes without a trace, leaving her favourite cuddly toy behind.
The subsequent police search is badly coordinated, the media turns the tragedy into a circus, and as the story unfolds, the private eye investigating the case (played by Affleck) finds her family increasingly suspect. Add in the fact that the young actress who plays the missing child looks startlingly like Madeleine McCann and even shares her first name, and it becomes obvious why the movie was held back last summer.
Affleck makes it clear he has no in-depth knowledge of the McCann case and wasn't involved in the decision to delay the release. 'But it made perfect sense to me. It's just a movie! You can release it in September, or June, or four years from now - it doesn't really make much difference in the world. This was a real little girl and a real family, and if anyone thought there was the smallest chance that it would interfere with the case, or if even having it out in the media would irritate these very deep wounds for her family, then you put the release off.'
The film is a thriller set in Boston's underclass, and the similarities to the McCanns' very real ordeal are purely superficial. But the film's ending is also jarring for anyone expecting the usual neat Hollywood resolution. Without giving anything away, Affleck's character is faced with an achingly difficult moral choice, and you may leave the cinema debating whether he was right. Is a child always best looked after by family? And who should decide?
'A lot of people I talked to were upset and confused by it,' Affleck says. 'But the ending - that was the whole movie, for me. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children co-operated quite a bit with the film, but they said they'd only support it if it kept the ending the way it is. Anything else, I think, would have been irresponsible.'
Scripts have been coming in, but he hasn't yet settled on his next big project. And if the recent accolades have gone to his head, he hides it well. The Oscar nomination was nice, he says, 'But honestly, I can't remember a single Oscar winner from last year, let alone who was nominated. So I think it helps for about six months, and then people have forgotten. I've met people I've always admired and wanted to have the opportunity to work with, but nothing has come of it.' He laughs, before adding wryly, 'Which makes me wonder what I was pining after all those years.'
Still, he doesn't feel that he has ever lived in his brother's shadow. 'I've pretty much had as much success as I want.' Acting, he points out, has rarely been his sole focus. He went to university in New York for a while, moved to Washington to be with a girlfriend, and in between sometimes took parts when they were offered, sometimes not. 'There was never a moment when I decided this is what I wanted to do, and pursued it relentlessly. I've never wished I spent all my time doing the work, doing interviews and walking down red carpets. That has never, ever crossed my mind.'
He has had plenty of opportunity to see the downside of celebrity. The tragic, untimely death of River Phoenix (Summer also has two sisters, Rain and Liberty) outside a Hollywood nightclub in 1993 became a focus for the worst kind of media voyeurism, while his own brother's life was put under extreme tabloid scrutiny during his ill-fated romance with the singer Jennifer Lopez.
'Does celebrity interest anyone?' Affleck asks incredulously. 'It's definitely not appealing to me. I think anyone who's had any real exposure to it would probably regret ever having even entertained the idea. For me the upside of working more is that you get to work a lot. The downside is that more people know who you are and want to stick a camera in your face when you've just got off an aeroplane and take your picture. And that's just a drag.'
He has a project in development now that won't even feature him on screen, an animated film that grew out of a story he made up to tell his nephew and his oldest son, who is now three. 'It's the story of the animals who were not chosen to go on Noah's Ark. Noah chooses two of every animal, and the rest get left behind, and it's about how they deal with their situation.'
Warner Brothers have picked up his script, and preliminary drawings of the characters are now being produced. 'It's a weird process. They do a visual development of it, rewrite once they've seen the characters and stuff, then they do the actual animation.'
For Affleck, family always comes first. His first son was born in Amsterdam while he was filming Ocean's Twelve, but there was never any doubt he would be present at the birth. 'If she goes into labour,' the director Steven Soderbergh told him, 'You just leave. There's not a single scene in this film that's indispensable.' Afterwards, when Affleck was tired and fluffed his lines, someone else in the gang simply took them over. 'Those films were a lot of fun,' he says. 'Everyone really gets along. I know that's how most people describe their experience of a movie, but often that's not the case - they're just being diplomatic.'
Summer gave birth to their second son last November, and Affleck is tired the morning we meet because the baby has had a rough night. 'I can't just sleep through it,' he shrugs. 'Other guys say, "What are you waking up for? Let your wife feed him." But I like to get up too.'
He is keen to do another play, but says he recently turned down a good role on Broadway because it was the wrong time to uproot his family to New York for six months. It wasn't a hard choice. 'Actors are pretty lucky. There's a lot of money in the film industry, and I don't have a very expensive lifestyle. If I wanted to, I could probably never work [as an actor] again, and I would be OK. I could get a job here,' he says, gesturing at the coffee shop, 'and I could probably make do. I never want to take a job for money.'
- 'Gone Baby Gone' is out on Friday
- We've teamed up with Miramax Films to offer you the chance to see itfirst and for free at exclusive preview screenings around the UK on Wednesday June 4.Click here and print out the voucher.