Ben Affleck gets candid on killing, reviving, and recasting his new thriller, Animals: ‘It’s a really interesting story’

Kerry Washington also weighs in on starring as Affleck’s on-screen wife — a role originally intended for his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.

The story behind how Ben Affleck’s new thriller Animals came together has nearly as many twists and turns as the movie itself. 

The actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker behind hits such as Air, Argo, and The Town is directing himself for the fifth time in the upcoming Netflix film about a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped in the heat of the race. The crime threatens to derail not only his campaign, but also his already-deteriorating marriage, as secrets and betrayals rise to the surface. 

Though admittedly “obsessed” with true crime, Affleck tells Entertainment Weekly that what really interested him about the story was its exploration of moral gray areas, “a sort of Rorschach test for the audience” that would “show something really honest, and in some ways provocative, and see how it lands with people.”

Perception vs. reality 

One of those areas was marriage. “How do you maintain a relationship? That’s obviously something that was on my mind,” quips the actor, whose relations have been tabloid fodder for decades. “What does a marriage really require of us? How well can we know one another?” And what happens to that bond when “something so scary happens in your life” that you’re forced to reevaluate those questions?  

Another theme that fascinates him is the discrepancy between who we are and how we want to be perceived. “We live in a world that increasingly asks us to live a presented life,” he says. Though always relevant to politicians and actors, with the advent of social media, “now everybody has a curated life that they present to the world more or less,” he says. What really captured his imagination, though, is “what happens when the mask comes off, when we can no longer afford to perform our identities.” 

With Animals, written by Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray, and Affleck, the actor found a playground to explore those ideas within the framework of a fast-paced crime thriller. But while the bones of the story have stayed mostly the same, the movie was originally going to look very different. And then it almost wasn’t made at all. So, what happened? 

The first cast

“It’s a really interesting story, actually,” he says.

When the film was first announced in January 2024, his longtime best friend, business partner, and frequent collaborator Matt Damon was set to star as Mark Kimball, the role Affleck now plays.

“I had such a joyful, amazing experience working with [Damon] on Air. It was just automatic. We had the best time of our lives, really,” Affleck says of the last time he directed and costarred with the actor. “He may have since superseded that with The Odyssey. I don’t know if he has; he’s nice enough not to tell me.”

Gillian Anderson also joined the cast as a mysterious consultant specializing in kidnappings, as did his The Rip costar Steven Yeun, who plays his pragmatic campaign manager. 

For Mark’s therapist wife, Affleck turned to his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner. “I thought, God, Jen Garner would be amazing for this role,” he says. “It also has the added benefit of, like, both of us will see our kids more because we do a week and a week and back and forth. I thought, well, we can coordinate our schedules around it.”

Garner last appeared on the big screen in a cameo as Elektra (a role she originated alongside Affleck in 2003’s Daredevil) in 2024’s Deadpool vs. Wolverine, but hasn’t led a film since 2023’s Family Switch. With Animals, Affleck thought, “She can bring something interesting that she hasn’t [done], that I kind of know she can do, that I don’t think she had a chance to do in one movie.”

But then, two weeks before production started, he pulled the plug.

Headwinds 

“We get very close to shooting, and then somebody said to me, ‘Hey, you know, there’s this other movie that Spike [Lee] and Denzel [Washington] are doing that’s about a kidnapping,” Affleck says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, s—.’”

That film was Apple and A24’s Highest 2 Lowest (2025), starring Washington as a music mogul whose son is taken by a kidnapper played by A$AP Rocky. Without getting into spoilers, Affleck notes, both films share a similar thematic device. 

Even though Animals is an original script, Affleck wanted to avoid any mistaken perception that he was creating a “competing version,” joking, “I’ve already been in one of the two asteroid movies” (referring to his 1998 movie Armageddon, which premiered the same year as Deep Impact).  

At first, he thought about delaying Animals to stagger the films’ releases, but when he later learned that Lee’s film is itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic High and Low, he admits, “That freaked me out.” (Though he knows it will “horrify Letterboxd aficionados,” Affleck says he hasn’t seen the Kurosawa film.)

After talking it out with Damon and his producing partners, including the former’s wife, Luciana Damon, Affleck made the difficult decision to move on. “We were two weeks from shooting, and I was like, ‘We’re not doing it,’” he says. “It’s hard enough to make a good movie. You don’t need those kinds of headwinds.”

Bringing Animals back to life

But Animals had already sunk its claws into the director.

Another major character in the film, the city of Los Angeles, was a constant reminder of what could have been. “I just was so disappointed because I really had gotten interested as well in this idea of doing a movie about L.A.,” he says. “I realized I’d lived here longer than I’ve lived in Boston.” 

For Affleck, the city furthered the film’s theme of perception versus reality. “It does this thing of presenting an image and having a different inside,” he says of the city, which he points out has a stark economic divide between its white and Latino populations (another theme in the film). 

“You have a world where everyone says, ‘Oh, we’re family,’ and projects a set of virtues and values, but you see things that are discordant with that,” he explains. “And I thought, ‘But that’s the same in a marriage. That’s the same in our lives, making our stories up about ourselves as we go along to suit the people that we encounter.”

So, a couple of months after he stepped away from the project, Affleck says, “I was like, God, this is really sticking with me, and I actually wanna do this.”

Recasting the leads

A new problem then arose: Damon was no longer available. 

“Matt was unfortunately doing another lesser film, obviously, with Odyssey,” Affleck says with a laugh. “He chose a smaller director and a smaller film and a smaller role for his career, and I think he’s gonna suffer for it. He’ll regret this choice.” So, he jokes, “A better actor had to play the part, naturally.”

But once he decided to play Mark himself, he ended up in the awkward position of playing the husband of his ex-wife in a movie about a rocky marriage. “I talked to Jen, and she was like, ‘We don’t wanna do that. You just get baggage,’” he says.

“I would love to work with her, frankly,” he continues about Garner. “She’s fabulous, and we’re really good friends, and I’m profoundly grateful to her, and we have a great thing. I still would wanna work with her in the future, but what you don’t wanna do is take the audience’s baggage and have it work against you, you know?”

Enter Kerry Washington 

Affleck always wanted to work with the Scandal star, whom he got to know during the writers’ strikes. “She’s very polished, but she’s also very warm. I thought, Oh my God, she’s amazing for this.”

So, he texted her about taking over as Abigail. “I really loved when he shared with me the themes that he wanted to explore,” Washington says of those early conversations. “I thought it was a really good combination of a fun, exciting thriller, but with some more meaningful ideas that stay with you.”

When Affleck told her he was interested in exploring marriage, Washington admits, “Sometimes, as a woman, you hear that, and you’re like, ‘I bet not. I bet they’re just saying that because they want me to think my character’s important.’”

But when she read the script, she was intrigued to find that “it wasn’t a happy marriage; it was a pretty horrible dynamic between the two of them,” she says, laughing. “It was exciting to see the journey of their marriage through this traumatic unfolding of events. There are certain couples where, when tragedy strikes, or there’s a crisis at hand, it either moves them closer together or breaks them apart.”

Leaving it to the audience

Casting Washington also brought meaningful changes to the story. For one, Affleck’s character was suddenly in an interracial marriage, which brought further complexity to the dynamics he wanted to explore. 

“What I don’t wanna do is ignore it,” Affleck says he told Washington when she asked how they would handle that aspect. “This is a movie about real life and real people, and our ethnicity is as much a part of how people see us as anything else. So, then we built this whole backstory around that, which opened the door to really unexpected moments in scenes that were just honest and real.”

Washington and Yeun also had ideas for how their characters would interact. “I was like, ‘Great, write the scene,’” Affleck says. “It’s a trick I really learned from Richard Linklater on Dazed and Confused, who said, ‘Come, write stuff.’… You get these extraordinary contributions that I couldn’t author.”

Those contributions only strengthened Affleck’s confidence about returning to finish the film. “What I’m really interested in is something wholly apart from, I think, what these other movies are dealing with,” he says of the other two kidnapping films. “I think it’s different enough, at least from what I understand about those movies, that this will be judged on its own merits, frankly.”

Still, after a rollercoaster lifetime in the spotlight, Affleck says he’s learned to “give primacy to my own sense of success and failure,” which, he adds, “also helps me take more risks, try stuff I’m more interested in, and it’s been a virtuous cycle, so to speak, for me.”

Animals will be available theatrically in select cities and streaming on Netflix on Oct. 9.

Via: Entertainment Weekly