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"They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that?"
Ben Affleck shared the physical requirements he had to meet for his 1998 movie "Armageddon."
The 49-year-old was interviewed by Matt Damon for the February issue of Entertainment Weekly where the longtime friends and collaborators had a conversation about Affleck's career.
Though Affleck is used to preparing for different roles and getting into character, the "Batman" actor confessed that he was a little surprised by the physical change producers wanted him to undergo for his "Armageddon" project.
"I was a little naive about the opinions people would form about me," Affleck admitted, the film follows an oil driller who is trained to become an astronaut. "Or Michael [Bay] and Jerry [Bruckheimer]'s focus on aesthetics, like, 'You guys gotta go to the tanning bed!'"
"They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that?" he recalled. "'Go to the gym!' Running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff, and it just turned out to be a long-form version of one of those male topless calendars, in a garage, carrying a tire, kind of greased up."
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View StoryAffleck shared that Bay "had a vision of a glistening male torso in the oil, and he was like, 'That's going to go in the trailer and sell tickets!' And you know, what can you say? We could have made, I think, 400 Chasing Amys for what we made Armageddon for."
The actor added, "It's funny because that's the one movie of mine that my kids have watched and they'll kind of all admit to liking, even though they relentlessly mock it and me. 'What are you, driving a tank on the moon?' But they had fun, you know what I mean? They won't even watch 'The Town'. So there you have it."
"Armageddon" follows a group of oil drillers who are trained for an important mission when an asteroid threatens to collide with Earth. The oil drillers are tasked to drill through the surface of the rogue asteroid in an effort to detonate a bomb within it.
Affleck stars opposite Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton and Liv Tyler. The movie became a wild success and grossed $553 million worldwide, eventually becoming the highest-grossing film of 1998.
