“The challenge for me was the months and months I spent training to line dance,” said Ben Affleck at the SXSW premiere Saturday of The Accountant 2 – “that was my stunt. Tom Cruise has nothing on me, just in terms of line dancing.”
Gavin O’Connor returned to direct the sequel to his original 2016 film, which starred Affleck, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal and Cynthia Addai-Robinson – all of whom are back and took the stage for a Q&A at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Bill Dubuque also returned to pen the follow-up.
It took years to get the second film out. “Timing is everything,” O’Connor said. “We just pressed forward” and found a good fit with Affleck and Matt Damon’s company, Artists Equity, and a partner in Amazon MGM Studios.
Affleck said “it was wonderful” to revisit his character, the autistic, brilliant and kickass Christian Wolff, after all these years.
O’Connor and DuBuque “really wanted to create fully fleshed out characters from all these people … Because these characters are interesting setups … The story, really, is about the humanity of these people and trying to connect them and trying to align them with one another. And it was really a lot of fun.”
Berthal, who plays Christian’s lethal brother Brax, agreed.
“I think there’s a really strong foundation in the first film. You get to see them as kids [but] they don’t really get too much time together. Now, it’s just such a such a joy to do it, to do it with Ben.”
He called Affleck “a hero of mine … equal parts beautiful person as he is a beautiful artist. And it was just really cool … Making movies for me is usually knocking my head into a wall and kind of hating myself . This was very easy.”
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