A new direction for battered Ben

Stung by the 'Bennifer' affair and a string of turkeys, Ben Affleck slipped under the radar. Ryan Gilbey looks at whether his new film, Gone Baby Gone, will put him back in the game? When Ben Affleck says he wanted to remove his name from Gone Baby Gone, the new thriller he co-wrote and directed, it should not be interpreted as any slight on the picture. In fact, he's a big fan. He even downloaded it recently.

You can imagine him, cradling his iPod in his baseball-mitt hands like an ogre nursing a matchbox, pressing his equine face close to the tiny screen. "Whenever it becomes available in some new venue, I buy it again," he chuckles. "It all adds to the till." He assumes a humble, trembling voice: "'No, ma'am, I'm not Ben Affleck, I'm just a regular person, buying this fine movie.'"

The way he tells it, not being Ben Affleck would sometimes be positively advantageous to his career. He wrangled with the union (and lost) over taking his directing credit off the beginning of the film because he thought his name would be a distraction to audiences. "I didn't want people coming in saying, 'Oh, so this is Ben Affleck's movie, huh? Right, let's see what kinda job he did.'"

But even that imaginary consumer will surely be silenced by Affleck's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel, in which the director's kid brother, Casey, plays a private eye searching for a child who has been snatched from her south Boston home.

Affleck knows that manor well: he and his childhood friend Matt Damon, whom he met when he was eight years old, grew up in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pair set their screenplay, Good Will Hunting, in south Boston, and although that film (directed by Gus Van Sant) was uncomfortably manipulative, it displayed an acute sensitivity to the everyday boredom of life on the breadline in "Southie".

Gone Baby Gone is likewise enriched by Affleck's insider knowledge, as well as by documentary footage of real-life Boston residents untouched by wardrobe departments, ramshackle locations untroubled by production designers.

"I wanted it all to feel real," says the tall, sturdy, 35-year-old Affleck. "That was my mantra."

But it turned out to be a touch too real. The picture was on course for a gala screening at last year's London film festival, with its release planned for soon after that. Then the distributor decided the echoes of the Madeleine McCann case were too potent (the snatched child goes by the not-dissimilar name of Amanda MacReady) and, somewhat hysterically, pulled the plug. In PR- speak, the delay has allowed the buzz to build.

In the interim, Amy Ryan was Oscar-nominated for playing Amanda's feckless mother in Gone Baby Gone, while Casey Affleck's stock has risen after his aching turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And, wherever the film has played, it has drawn acclaim the way its director once attracted - and, really, there's no nice way to say this - ire, mockery and disdain.

Even now, it would be difficult to overstate the contempt in which Affleck was held for the first half of this decade. But why? No one could say he hadn't earned his dues. He began as a chirpy child actor on US television; after dropping out of university and moving to Los Angeles with Damon in the early 1990s, he vacuumed up any bit-parts he could find. (Quite sweetly, the chums occasionally turned up in the same films, the same shots - they were extras in Field of Dreams, and anti-semitic bullyboys in School Ties.)

Affleck was cast in Kevin Smith's unloved 1996 comedy Mallrats, and while it would be pushing things to say that he became the De Niro to Smith's Scorsese, the director then handed him a juicy leading role as the cartoonist who falls for a lesbian in Chasing Amy, and a part in each of his movies to date.

Smith was also instrumental in getting Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein to stump up the cash to make Good Will Hunting, the story of a young MIT janitor who happens also to be an attractively screwed-up math genius.

Affleck and Damon had been peddling the script around Hollywood for almost five years; sometimes their insistence that Damon would play the lead, with Affleck as his best friend, was the deal-breaker, sometimes not. But Affleck maintains they never got close to caving in or compromising. "We had nothing to lose," he reflects. "And we had the certainty that this thing was for us. We never considered the option of not being in it ourselves."

Once they won the 1998 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, there was plenty to lose. Affleck's problems most likely began when he was perceived to have swapped the aw-shucks amiability of his nerve-wracked Oscar acceptance speech for leads in two Michael Bay piledrivers: Armageddon and, as if he hadn't learned his lesson, Pearl Harbor.

He still provided intermittent evidence that he could do more than play second fiddle to fireballs and CGI: he was endearing as a man who should have died but didn't in Bounce, opposite his then- girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow, and was strikingly free of vanity as a frazzled lawyer in Changing Lanes. But either he was never offered, or never said yes to the sort of strange, eclectic roles that were going to those men with whom he admits to enjoying a "healthy competitiveness" - his brother Casey, and Damon.

With the exception of Affleck's fine, ambivalent portrayal of the Superman star George Reeves in Hollywoodland (which won him the Best Actor prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival), his CV essentially resembles a never-ending Thanksgiving dinner: one turkey after another.

When he started dating Jennifer Lopez in 2002, it was exactly the signal that the media needed for a proper carve-up. Even now, he seems dazed by the animosity that was levelled at them. And who can blame him? All he did was make some ropey movies and nearly marry a pop star. Going into the relationship - which began on the set of the misguided caper Gigli - Affleck believed he could put a quirky spin on their romance. It was his idea to spoof the anticipated media interest by appearing in the promo for Lopez's single Jenny from the Block, in which their trysts (on a hotel balcony, in a cafe, on a yacht) were shot through a paparazzo's long lens. "It was satire!" he insists. I don't know which of us is less convinced.

Whatever, his belief that he could control their media image was touchingly idealistic. "Yeah!" he booms through his laughter. "It really was, wasn't it? Look, the whole thing was cooked up by the media. It wasn't me. I think I was bemused by all the attention at first. Then later the disgust set in. The problem was that our coupledom became the first example of something to which everyone is quite inured now. When it first happened, this weird merging of celebrities, the media couldn't believe its luck; I mean, they sold a lot of magazines on the back of us."

I point out that there had been numerous other examples - Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Penn and Madonna - but he argues that it was different for him and Lopez.

"This was the first time there had been this," he clambers for the right word, "this fusion of names." Then the penny drops. He's going to an awful lot of effort to avoid uttering the term "Bennifer", coined to evoke a partnership that, to the world at large, resembled strongly a cross-branding opportunity. But I think his point is valid: Bennifer suffered so that the likes of Brangelina could escape widespread vilification.

He seems to have learned his lesson now, which is to stay under the radar if you want the work to matter. He has been married since 2005 to the actress Jennifer Garner, whom he met while playing a blind superhero in Daredevil; the couple have a two-year-old daughter, Violet. And he has given a lot of time to political campaigning, first for John Kerry and now Barack Obama.

When I meet him, he has just returned from shooting a CNN report on the SPLM (Sudan People's Liberation Movement). It's all a reassuringly long way from Jenny from the Block. "It hasn't been this pleasant in my personal life since '95 or '96," he sighs. "I have a good relationship with the world. But I don't know what the trick is to maintaining it."

That's easy. Make more films like Gone Baby Gone - more good films. And keep your head down.