Fincher on Affleck even before divorce: 'He's so duplicitous

Maybe it was a documentary.

Director David Fincher may have predicted his star Ben Affleck's marital woes in his DVD commentary for the 2014 crime thriller "Gone Girl."

Discussing Affleck's performance as a cheating husband suspected in his wife's disappearance and possible murder, Fincher seemed to get a little creeped out by how easy the actor found getting into character.

"This is something that Ben is extraordinarily good at, when he has to cook up a phone conversation, when he has to hear somebody on the other end of the phone," Fincher says in the commentary, remarks first flagged by the tumblr blog, Maaarine.


EVAN AGOSTINI/INVISION/AP
Affleck, left, and his real-life wife of 10 years, Jennifer Garner, recently announced they are getting divorced.

MERRICK MORTON/ TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
Ben Affleck rehearses a scene with director David Fincher on the set of ‘Gone Girl.’
"If I was his wife, I think I would be very suspicious, always, of whoever just called," he adds, laughing, "because he has a real gift at being able to insinuate a conversation."

Fincher's analysis may have been made at least slightly in jest, but it takes on a different tone after Affleck, 42, and his wife Jennifer Garner, 43, announced they were ending their 10-year marriage.

A source told US Weekly that Affleck "admitted to cheating" on his wife last year.

PHOTO: MERRICK MORTON
Ben Affleck’s character, Nick, cheats and lies to his wife Amy, played by Rosamund Pike, in the movie.
Garner immediately kicked her 42-year-old husband out of the Pacific Palisades home the couple shares with their three children, "but eventually decided to forgive him," according to the insider's account.

Though Fincher likely didn't know about Affleck's off-screen drama while recording his commentary for the "Gone Girl" Blue-Ray and DVD release, the coincidences are eerie.

"He has to do these things in the foreground where he takes out his phone and looks at it and he puts it away so his sister doesn't see it," recalls Fincher. "There are people who do that and it's too pointed. But Ben is very, very subtle and there's a kind of indirectness to the way he can do those things.