How Armageddon Rocketed Ben Affleck to Movie Star Status

Ben Affleck Has Priceless Reaction to Winning Grand Prize on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’

Quick, which asteroid-hurtling-toward-earth disaster flick from 1998 do you remember?

If you answered the one with hunky Ben Affleck, you are correct. And for your efforts, Armageddon is now streaming on Fandango At Home.

But the blockbuster, which also stars Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton and Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," couldn't help but make a deep impact.

"You might have a chance of having a successful movie at the box office," executive producer Jonathan Hensleigh, who conceived the original story and co-wrote Armageddon's screenplay with J.J. Abrams, said in a 2018 interview with E! News. "But it increases your odds exponentially if you include really strong character stuff."

Consider the chemistry between Affleck's A.J. and Tyler's Grace and the tear-jerking heroics performed in space by a top-notch crew of deep-core oil drillers led by Grace's dad Harry (Willis) to be the stuff summer blockbusters are made of.

For Armageddon, this meant establishing Willis as a blue-collar master oil driller handpicked by NASA to bore a hole in an asteroid so that his team can plant a bomb and blow it up from within in order to save the world.

Similarly, Affleck had to be believable as roughneck A.J., who both works for Harry and—much to the boss' dismay—is in love with his daughter.

Working alongside Bay, Hensleigh also created back stories for NASA's on-the-ground director Dan Truman, played by Thornton, and other members of Harry's drilling crew played by Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson and the late Michael Clarke Duncan. 

"Bruce is the star, and it's Bruce's movie," Affleck said in commentary included on the Criterion Collection DVD/Blu-ray, "but more so than most of these movies, they went against type in a sense that they did try to at least have kind of limited story lines for each of the few main ensemble players."

He added, "[It's] to try to develop a thing where you care about a bunch of people. and it sort of holds your interest."

From the beginning, though, Hensleigh told E!, "when I did the first draft, I had Bruce in mind more than anything because I'd come off working with him in Die Hard With a Vengeance."

Then 25, Affleck "was an emerging star" at the time, the writer recalled. "He had the Good Will Hunting project in the can, and you know, he had become a really, kind of go-to young star, and I loved him." 

But prior to landing the role of oil driller shot into space to save the world, Affleck's resume consisted of mostly supporting parts and indie films, his biggest chunk of screen time coming in Kevin Smith's 1997 romantic dramedy Chasing Amy, and he'd yet to be a full-on leading man in a big-budget production. 

Despite this, Hensleigh "was enormously in support" of casting Affleck for this breakout role. "We were all confident," he said. "I mean, look at the guy!"

Affleck, indeed, nailed the part of the beefy but sensitive A.J., his chiseled jaw and muscled frame serving him as well as the script. He may have had his concerns about how realistic Armageddon's plot was, but he didn't let on until much later.

Audiences packing theaters that summer weren't complaining.

"Master drillers who are running the rigs," Hensleigh continued, "are very experienced guys [who] have been doing it for years and years and years"—something Willis' character explains to the head of NASA toward the beginning of the movie. 

"You know, drilling's a science. It's an art," Harry says. "I'm a third generation driller, doin' it all my life. I still haven't got it all figured out."

Even Bay clarified in a 2013 blog post (since deleted) that he had nothing to apologize for. "And still today Armageddon is still one of the most shown movies on cable TV," he wrote. "And yes, I'm proud of the movie. Enough said."

Hensleigh, whose screenwriting credits also include Jumanji and The Rock, told E!, "I like to think that a lot of these pictures stand up really well, and the ones that were as commercially successful as Armageddon, they were harbingers of the kind of character-based action pictures that are successful today—particularly the Marvel movies that are heavily character-oriented, and they're mission movies."

If they set out to remake Armageddon, "the effects would be done differently because technology's changed so much," he said, "but I like to think that it would be releasable right now, and it would be just as big a hit."

Copy that.

With this mission accomplished, catch Armageddon on Fandango and keep scrolling to see Ben Affleck through the years: