Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal reunite as brothers in ‘The Accountant 2’
Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal discuss their real-life brotherly bond in “The Accountant 2.”
In “The Accountant 2,” Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) struck out at speed dating and failed to make a permanent addition to his life. But director Gavin O’Connor, who has always envisioned the franchise as a trilogy, said at the movie’s South by Southwest premiere in March that the third installment (which is in discussion) would be “Christian finding connection and love.”
In the first film released in 2016, Christian, a neurodivergent math genius, and accountant Dana Cummings (Anna Kendrick) had a fondness for each other but couldn’t make it work. In the sequel (in theaters now), Christian struggled to kindle a romance.
“Something that I find really beautiful is the naked yearning to say, ‘I want to have this kind of connection with another person. It’s just difficult for me to figure out the sort of coded language that everybody seems to be using,’ ” Affleck, 52, says. “We’ve all had those moments where we reflect, ‘Did I say the wrong thing? Oh, my God, I’m so stupid.’ ”
Christian “doesn’t say the thing that he’s supposed to say, or that maybe they expect, or what the right answer is,” Affleck acknowledges. “And sometimes it just really blows up in his face. And we all feel that way, like, ‘Oh, if I tell the truth about who I really am, or my insecurities, or my fears or even what I like or my hobbies, is the other person going to think that’s lame and judge me?’
“And so we have this constant tension of the advertised self and the real self and never is that more in conflict than in these moments of trying to make that first dating connection.”
Thinking ahead to the third chapter, Affleck says he and O’Connor have chatted about what kind of woman Christian should end up with.
“But if I give it away to you, it will ruin whole movie,” he teases. “There is a natural evolution here because at the first movie, he’s really just grappling with his own feelings around that and what those mean. But the prospect seems a little distant. In the second one here, he really is being proactive and making choices and decisions and knowing, ‘I want to do this. I’m going to set about trying to do this,’ in a way that’s almost heartbreaking in how deliberate it is.
“That’s sort of the second phase is meeting someone, getting to know someone, the first connection,” Affleck says. “Then ultimately, there are a whole other set of human mysteries that surround what it’s like to be in a relationship, and I think that would be a really, really interesting, really fertile ground to explore.”
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