Source: USA Today

It’s rainy and cool Sunday here in Toronto, and the scene is decidedly quieter than Saturday, when The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford premiered here to serious hoopla. Naturally, clusters of fans went nuts when they spotted Brad Pitt and girlfriend Angelina Jolie outside on the red carpet. When the couple tried to get in their car later, fans threw themselves on the vehicle. Yes, really.

Pitt’s costar Casey Affleck calls the entire gala “weird. In the theater people were craning their necks and trying to just spot celebrities and take pictures.”

At his previous stop at the Venice film fest, where Pitt won the best actor prize, movie attendees were less fan and more buff, he says.

Affleck is in town with wife Summer Phoenix, who’s expecting another boy, and their son Indiana, 3. And he’s been earning major raves for his performance as Pitt’s killer in Jesse James.

What sold Affleck on the film? The chance to work with Andrew Dominik, who directed Chopper. “And Jesse James is going to be Brad Pitt. I thought, this sounds like an awfully good project,” says Affleck. “For me, it’s been extremely uncommon to like a project in this way. I’m pretty picky.”

Next on his agenda? Getting some sleep, before heading out of Toronto on Monday.

Source: New York Magazine

With two big roles this fall, the younger Affleck brother may wind up the more famous one.

Casey Affleck is not the Nanny-Shagging Fop, the Bongo-Bopping Jock, the Eternally Rehabbing Genius, the Square-Jawed Humanitarian, or the Nice-Guy Action Star. So far, he’s avoided being typed. “I don’t think journalists have much impression of me,” he says. “I haven’t really done all that many interviews, partly by choice, and partly because no one’s been all that interested,” he adds, voice not-quite-cracking as usual. “Now things are getting different.”

Until this fall, the tag Ben Affleck’s Kid Brother has sufficed, but that won’t stick for long–not after the performances he delivers in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (opening this week) and Gone Baby Gone, the directorial debut of his big brother (October 19). Very soon, maybe this Oscar season, Casey, 32, is going to be a star. He might even get his own tabloid caricature, whether he likes it or not.

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Source: LA Times

It wasn’t intended to play out this way. There was no master plan. And yet back-to-back fall movie releases are pushing Casey Affleck out of the supporting-sidekick category and into the ranks of leading men, edging him ever closer to seeing the disappearance of the comma that often follows his name before the words “brother of Ben Affleck.”

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” has been beset by post-production delays and backstage wranglings that have held up its release since last fall, so when it finally hits theaters Sept. 21, it will be closely followed Oct. 19 by “Gone Baby Gone,” a moody thriller based on a novel by Dennis Lehane in which Affleck plays a laconic, small-time private detective. Both roles involve young men forced into lose-lose situations that will indelibly mark the courses of their lives and, taken together, they show in the actor a newfound maturity and a previously unexplored depth and range.

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