Ben Affleck came away with a "fuller conviction" about autism after starring in ‘The Accountant’.
The Oscar-winning actor plays autistic maths genius Christian Wolff in the new film and says he conducted a lot of research to make sure he was sympathetic.
He said: "I didn’t come away with a deep, full understanding of autism, but I came away with a fuller conviction, a sort of humanist sense that we’re all so much more a like than we believe. Because they were all in search of a connection with one another.
"And some people with autism are just more … hindered from making that connection that others. But the want is still there, the want to have a relationship, the want to have a friend, the want to communicate. And that was what was really moving about the research."
However, Ben says his alter-ego is not intended to be the most representative autistic character seen on the screen.
He told TimeOut during a sitdown in Los Angeles: "We’re seeing a high-functioning person. I wanted to make sure that people understood that this isn’t meant to be all autistic people. The people I talked to were happy to see that there’s somebody in a movie who’s very functional, who can do a lot of things, even special things. That doesn’t mean to diminish or to say that people who are less functional don’t exist.
"Most people [I spoke to] were kind of like ‘Look, don’t worry about it, we’re all kinds of people, we function at all different levels, we’re into it, we think it’s cool.’ Some people were like ‘Oh you’re doing an autistic superhero movie’, and I kinda got inspired by that idea and of finding the special and the cool about the character so it would be something that people with autism might be into, especially kids."
Ben Affleck’s autism conviction
