Ben Affleck is breaking down viral discourse about his Gone Girl shower scene.
“I wore no prosthesis,” Affleck, 54, told Variety in a profile published Wednesday, October 7, when asked about his full-frontal scene in the 2014 thriller. “I’ve only worn one in one film, Hollywoodland. It was a nose.”
Sans prosthetic, Affleck starred as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl opposite Rosamund Pike as his wife, Amy Dunne. The film, adapted from Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name, follows Nick after he becomes the prime suspect following Amy’s shocking and high-profile disappearance.
Amid the onscreen drama, Affleck stripped down for a steamy shower scene.
“Director David [Fincher] said to me from the beginning, ‘This is a warts and all movie. It can have no vanity. You have to see the naked underbelly of this character,’” the actor recalled to MTV in 2014. “[He told me], ‘It’s gotta be like in Europe, they just don’t give a s*** about any of that stuff and they just play real people.’ There is some brief, very brief nudity, I think.”
Teasing the nude scene, Affleck revealed at the time that “the penis is in” the scene.
“It costs extra. It’s IMAX penis,” he joked. “You’ve gotta pay fifteen bucks to see it in 3-D. It looks better in 3-D. It was a very cold set. It was freezing. It was subzero.”
Affleck’s wife at the time, Jennifer Garner, separately joked that her then-spouse’s full-frontal scenes would likely help ratings.
“What I have to say is, ‘You’re welcome,’” Garner, now 54, quipped on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in October 2014. “I just try to consider myself a charitable person and I wanted to give back. You give me so much, I wanted to give something back to all of you.”
Affleck and Garner were married from 2005 to 2018. Despite their split, they now amicably coparent their three children.
“I work hard, and then I go home and pick up the kids from school. We have dinner if they agree to hang out with me. They’re with me for a week, then with their mom for a week,” he told Variety of the exes’ custody arrangements. “They have a great thing with their mom, for whom I’m also really, really grateful. I know things will come up that are hard, and I don’t want to jinx that, but this time in my life as a human being is really wonderful.”
