Casey Affleck addresses past sexual misconduct allegations: ‘The best thing to do was to just be quiet’
The Cambridge native acknowledged that the set of his film "I'm Still Here" was "a big mess."
Casey Affleck has mostly avoided discussing the now-settled lawsuits stemming from his 2010 directorial debut, “I’m Still Here.” But the Cambridge native opened up on actor Dax Shepard’s podcast while promoting his second directorial effort, “Light of My Life.”
Affleck told Shepard that the values central to the #MeToo movement are “values that are at the heart of my being.” When the lawsuits — which alleged sexual misconduct and other harassment — resurfaced during the height of the movement, the “Manchester by the Sea” star decided his best course of action was to say nothing at all.
“The way that I’m thought of sometimes by certain people recently has been so antithetical to who I really am that it’s been frustrating,” Affleck told Shepard. “And not being able to talk about it has been hard because I really wanted to support all of that, but I felt like the best thing to do was to just be quiet so I didn’t seem to be in opposition to something that I really wanted to champion.”
“I’m Still Here,” a mockumentary chronicling actor Joaquin Phoenix’s (fake) decision to leave his acting career behind and become a hip-hop artist, involved Phoenix staying in character as a bizarro version of himself in public while Affleck filmed, including during a contentious appearance on David Letterman’s late-night show.
Because of the deliberately blurred lines of reality central to the film’s conceit, Affleck acknowledged that the way the film set for “I’m Not Here” was run was “a big mess,” and that it was “not something I would do again.”
“There was a ton of partying, because that was the content of this documentary, at times mockumentary,” Affleck said. “We’re recording everything. It was confusing for everybody and it was deliberately so. And that’s my responsibility. The intention was to have the crew as a part of the movie. I don’t know how much they knew they were a part of the movie.”
