Ben Affleck is to take Matt Damon’s role in Animals, opposite Gillian Anderson. Affleck is still set to direct.
With Christopher Nolan seemingly determined to suck up every last movie star in the Hollywood pantheon for his upcoming epic The Odyssey, film productions all over the world may find themselves bereft of star power. Given that we’ve just emerged from a year where the supply line of films was starved due to 2023’s actors’ strikes, let’s hope that Mr Nolan’s seeming determination to assemble half of Hollywood for his next major production doesn’t cause another dry spell as film productions everywhere realise they have no actors.
Don’t worry though, because Ben Affleck is here to save the day. Well, for one production anyway. Affleck was slated to work with Matt Damon on Animals, which would have repeated the formula the long-time collaborators most recently engineered on 2023’s Air, where Damon starred and Affleck directed. Instead, Affleck will now replace Damon in the lead role to keep things on schedule, given that the project was supposed to film last year but was postponed when Affleck chose to shoot The Accountant 2 instead.
As for Animals, we do know that the film will revolve around ‘“’a mayoral candidate and his wife whose son is kidnapped. Surrounded by plenty of enemies, political and otherwise, the husband and wife have no choice but to get their hands dirty in order to save their son.’
The wife in question will be played by the wonderful GIllian Anderson, meaning reports from a year ago suggesting that Jennifer Garner would be taking that role may have been premature.
Production on the film is set to begin next month in Los Angeles. There’s no word as yet as to whether Affleck plans to follow up Animals by ‘saving Hollywood’ and featuring in all of the other productions which have had to reshuffle things to work around Nolan’s starry ensemble. If that does prove to be the case though, we’d especially like to see him take on Zendaya’s role as MJ in the Spider-Man films, and whilst he’s at it, could he possibly fill in for Robert Pattinson on the sequel to The Batman? Oh, wait a second…
