Ben Affleck's traumatic memory with Persian-speaking actor!

Dec 31, 2012

Entertainment

As part of a Director Roundtable published in The Hollywood Reporter (link), Ben Affleck has shared that one of his worst moments as a film director was in "Argo" with a Persian-speaking actor who was overdoing it:

Affleck directing ARGO

" I've fired a couple of actors. It's the worst thing in the world because I know, as an actor, what it's like. I was a child actor, and the director threatened to fire me. That traumatized me. I was 13 years old. And I went around in fear of being fired. So this movie [Argo] was the only time I really fired people, but I had to do it. I had all these Persian actors who were supposed to speak Farsi. And often they would audition in English and I would say, "You can speak Farsi, right?" "Oh, yes, yes." A guy came in for a really crucial part, and on the day of shooting, we were blocking the scene, and this guy's got this mini speech. And the guy did it, and it was just terrible. He was sort of like, you know, twisting the mustache and being the Iranian villain and having the accent and adding all these flourishes. A couple times I said: "Just do nothing and say your lines. Let's try that." And just previous to that, there was this guy who had a little bit in the movie. But it was so nice. And then when this other guy was blowing it -- and not just blowing it, but hamming it up -- it made it easy to say, "No, you know, you're trying to ruin my movie."

Argo is about former CIA "Master of Disguise" Tony Mendez (pictured below) who smuggled six American diplomats out of Tehran during the hostage crisis in 1979, by concocting a fake Canadian movie production, called "Argo," and pretending the diplomats were part of the film crew. Mendez and his wife, both CIA operatives, specialized in forging foreign documents, creating disguises and handling other graphical work related to espionage.

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