Move over, Tom Cruise — there’s a new stuntman in town.
Or rather, a new dancer. In “The Accountant 2,” Ben Affleck reprises the role of autistic criminal and math whiz Christian Wolff, and his performance in one particular scene made the Texan crowd at SXSW roar with laughter and applause.
Chris usually struggles with women — even beginning the film with a rocky experience at a speed dating event — but finds himself on the dance floor at a country bar after a woman starts to flirt with him. When she first approaches him at his booth, where he’s joined by his brother Braxton (Jon Bernthal), he blows it, but after observing the repetitive motions of the line dancing crowd, he decides to join in. He’s wearing orthopedic sneakers, in contrast to everyone else’s cowboy boots, but he picks up the steps with ease, and scores a phone number in the process.
“For me, the challenge, of course, was the months and months I spent training to line dance. It was a stunt for me,” Affleck said onstage at Austin’s Paramount Theater after the film’s world premiere. “Tom Cruise has nothing on me.” As the audience cheered at the joke, he sheepishly added, “In terms of line dancing.”
Affleck’s moves turned out to be everyone’s favorite topic of conversation during the post-screening Q&A. Later on, as director Gavin O’Connor asked the audience not to post spoilers online, Affleck joked, “Please don’t talk about my nude scene.” “There was a nude scene but we cut it. He practiced line dancing in front of the mirror,” O’Connor added, before Affleck said, “It was a choice! I liked it!”
Bernthal noted that while “The Accountant” delves into Chris and Brax’s childhoods, it doesn’t give the adult characters much time together, which made him excited to work alongside Affleck in the sequel. “Ben’s a hero of mine. I admire him so much, because he’s equal parts beautiful person as he is a beautiful artist,” he said. “Making movies for me is usually knocking my head into a wall; I’m kind of hating myself. But this was very easy. It was very easy to work with him.”
Unlike the original film, “The Accountant 2” features several autistic actors. When SXSW Film and TV head Claudette Godfrey asked the panel about “raising the bar” casting-wise, producer Lynette Howell Taylor responded, “Whenever there’s an opportunity to knock down the barriers to entry to new talent, like neurodiverse talent that maybe doesn’t have the opportunity to showcase what they can do, why wouldn’t we do that? There’s a lived experience. These actors came with their own individual stories that make the characters richer, and they gave all of us so many ideas that we just simply wouldn’t have come up with on our own.”
One of those actors was Allison Robertson, who made her feature film debut playing Justine. The character works at Harbor Neuroscience, which gives autistic children forensic training.
“This was the best introduction to so-called Hollywood I could have ever had. I was a self-submit,” Robertson said, meaning she pursued the role on her own instead of having the support of an agent. “And it was even more meaningful that they chose me for me versus any other avenues I might have gone through.”