Ben Affleck has revealed Bruce Willis told him he needed to change his voice if he wanted to be a Hollywood star.
Bruce Willis told Ben Affleck he needed to change his voice if he wanted to be a Hollywood star.
Affleck has opened up about his friendship with the Die Hard star – who he appeared onscreen with in 1998 disaster movie Armageddon – and revealed Willis gave him some valuable advice on navigating the movie industry but he refused to listen when the veteran actor told him his voice was too high-pitched.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck explained: “Bruce Willis once turned to me and was like: ‘Your voice is too high,’.
“I was like: ‘What?’ He was like: ‘Don’t have that high voice.’ I was like: ‘Bruce, that’s just my voice. Can I change that?’
“[He said: ‘You don’t wanna sound like that, man! I’m helping you out!'”
Affleck added of the actor: “[He’s] he sweetest guy in the world. I love Bruce, and he really was giving me a tip.”
The Argo star revealed he ignored some more advice from Willis when he warned him not to appear in 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, which went on to win seven Oscars.
Affleck explained: “He was like: ‘Man, don’t go do that Shakespeare movie, man. You don’t wanna do that movie’. [He] was wrong about that one … [He] hadn’t read the script, in all fairness.”
In the interview, Affleck also gave his thoughts on the current state of Hollywood and warned the backlash over Tom Cruise’s new movie Digger is putting future filmmaking at risk.
The movie proved a disappointment at the box office despite having a huge budget and Affleck fears it could discourage studio heads from backing riskier projects and lead to a succession of “s***** homogenized movies”.
He said: “It’s a little bit like the high-school bullying thing, with people who hadn’t even seen movies. You see it happening now, frankly, with Digger …
“Everybody wants to celebrate this bomb as if it’s the most exciting thing to happen. And you think like, it’s a pretty ambitious, interesting movie made by interesting people who have talent …
“Everybody wants to count the money, what it lost or whatever. To me, I just think, if you punish movies that take risks, guess what you’re going to get? A bunch of s***** homogenized movies.
“You cannot do something interesting without taking a big swing. And that means you’re going to sometimes look bad.”
Bruce Willis told Ben Affleck to change his voice
