It's hard to believe but the creators behind Armageddon didn't think Ben Affleck was hot enough at first for his role as the disaster flick's heartthrob hero.
When Affleck was interviewed by his friend and former co-star Matt Damon for the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, the actor revealed that director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer wanted him to fix his teeth and work out more to "be sexy" for the 1998 film.
"I was a little naive about the opinions people would form about me," Affleck shared. "Or Michael and Jerry‘s focus on aesthetics, like, ‘You guys gotta go to the tanning bed!’ They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy."
"Be sexy, how do I do that?" he joked. "‘Go to the gym!’ Running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff, and it just turned out to be a long-form version of one of those male topless calendars, in a garage, carrying a tire, kind of greased up."
Affleck said that Bay "had a vision of a glistening male torso in the oil, and he was like, ‘That’s going to go in the trailer and sell tickets!’"
The actor added that he and Damon "could have made, I think, 400 Chasing Amys for what we made Armageddon for."
It turns out that Armageddon is one of Affleck's children's favorite movies of his. (The actor shares Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13, and Samuel, 9, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner.)
"[They] have watched and they’ll kind of all admit to liking [it], even though they relentlessly mock it and me. ‘What are you, driving a tank on the moon?’ But they had fun, you know what I mean? They won’t even watch The Town. So there you have it."
Although the space drama was a big hit when it released in theaters, Affleck admits that the plot "was totally absurd" and slightly agrees with his kids.
"They dug out two stages of Disney for huge asteroid craters, and I didn’t even think about the fact that the basic premise of the movie was totally absurd,” he shared. "Why are they training oil drillers to be astronauts rather than astronauts to be oil drillers? You would think the learning curve would be somewhat more steep on the oil-drillers-to-astronauts route."
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