Celebrity News

Actors are Ben Affleck’s puppets

Ben Affleck’s fast becoming one of Hollywood’s hottest directors, but the star admits he has one area of improvement behind the camera: mouthing actors’ lines. “That is a rather unfortunate tendency,” Affleck told us at a Peggy Siegal Co. premiere of his latest film, “Argo,” this week. “I sometimes will slightly lip-move along with the lines of the actors. The first time I did that was on ‘The Town.’ During one of Jeremy Renner’s close-ups, he was like, ‘Can I talk to you for a second? You’re mouthing my lines.’ It was like, ‘OK, I’ll stop doing that.’ Then Blake [Lively] said I did it to her . . . It’s a problem, and I’m working on it,” he joked. But “Argo” star Bryan Cranston added that Affleck might need to keep practicing. “[In a scene] at the end, I could see [Ben] mouthing my lines. I went, ‘You are doing the thing.’ And he went ‘Oh, [bleep]. Sorry.’ He gets so into [it] that he mouths.” Affleck attended a DC premiere of the film Wednesday with his wife, Jennifer Garner.