Casey Affleck Read His Bad Reviews During His ‘Manchester By The Sea’ Acceptance Speech

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There’s still another month-plus to go until 89th Academy Awards, and Casey Affleck has already won a dozen Best Actor trophies for his career-best work in Manchester By the Sea. On Tuesday night, he added a New York Film Critics Circle award to his increasingly heavy prize-shelf, which was already sagging with accommodations from critics in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego, and St. Louis. During his acceptance speech, Deadline reports that Affleck read from a list of reviews that the event’s host, NFYCC chairman and New York magazine reviewer David Edelstein, had written about him over the years.

From Triple 9: “Affleck, though likable, doesn’t have a lot of variety and resorts to chewing gum to give his character through-lines.”

From Out of the Furnace: “Affleck’s line readings would be too mumbly and mulish even for the glory days of ’50s Method [acting] and he might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Shoot Me.’ Fortunately, he’s not the lead.” And, “It’s looking like whenever I see Affleck’s name in a movie’s credits, you can expect a standard, genre B picture — slowed down and tarted up.”

Edelstein was apparently non-plussed by the unexpected shoutout — according to Deadline, “the crowd loved it, but Edelstein was stung and spent perhaps too much time in the final rounds of the night protesting too much, rather than just owning his words and moving on.” Affleck, who read the reviews in a bone-dry Massachusetts accent, admitted, “There’s never really been anything so horrible said about me that I haven’t either thought of or said to myself.” Apparently he hasn’t been reading Constance Wu’s Twitter.

(Via Deadline)

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