NEW YORK – Fans won’t miss the real-life similarities between Ben Affleck and Jack Cunningham, the character he plays in his new movie “The Way Back” (in theaters March 6).
Cunningham, a former high-school basketball star, returns to his alma mater as the team’s head coach. He does so while battling an alcohol addiction that ruined his marriage.
The parallels weren’t lost on director Gavin O’Connor, who notes that Affleck’s steeper learning curve was with the basketball rather than the bottle.
“That was the harder part, because Ben understood the alcoholism,” O’Connor says. “He’d never coached before. He’d never played basketball.”
‘I couldn’t crack it’: Ben Affleck explains why he’s done with Batman
Ben Affleck: ‘I have completed treatment for alcohol addiction’
Affleck has been open about his battle with alcohol abuse. “Battling any addiction is a lifelong and difficult struggle,” he wrote on Instagram in 2018 after announcing he’d completed a stint in rehab. “Because of that, one is never really in or out of treatment.”
The actor laughs when told O’Connor’s comment about the basketball aspect of the film being more difficult for him than the addiction.
“The greatest fiction of this movie is that at any time I was a great basketball star in high school,” Affleck jokes to USA TODAY. “I am not a great athlete; never been my thing. I mean, I can hit a little bit; I can play a little baseball, but I’ve always been interested in acting and that’s kind of what I’ve dedicated my time to.”
The former Batman acknowledges that prior to shooting, he didn’t have a good enough understanding of the game.
“We spent a lot of time” teaching Affleck basketball, O’Connor says. “I used to bring Ben down to the practices and in the beginning, he was very reserved. …So getting him up to speed with (basketball), that to me was more challenging than (the alcoholism).”
Like any good coach, Affleck deflected any success he had in his role to his castmates – the players. But for the actors, including Brandon Wilson and Will Ropp, who play two of the team’s stars, that meant attending a basketball camp at O’Connor’s behest.
“(The players) made me look so good,” Affleck says. “I could just kind of wave my arms and run up and down the sideline and they’d do all the work.”
