Ben Affleck and Matt Damon explain their questionable The Last Duel haircuts. Affleck and Damon have been collaborating on films for decades, their biggest triumph coming in 1998 when they won Oscars for writing the original screenplay for Good Will Hunting, a film in which they both also starred.
Affleck and Damon’s latest collaboration The Last Duel once again sees the pair sharing writing credits, with Nicole Holofcener as a third co-writer. Set in medieval France, the new movie sees Damon playing a knight who fights a duel with his own squire (Adam Driver) after the squire is accused of rape by the knight’s wife (Jodie Comer). Affleck is in the cast too as the movie’s villain, a scheming nobleman.
Acclaimed director Ridley Scott is behind the camera for the latest behind-the-scenes and on-screen collaboration between Damon and Affleck. As the actors revealed in an interview for EW, Scott was not just responsible for giving The Last Duel its gritty medieval look, he was also the man who gave them their notably odd haircuts for the film. As Damon explained, “Ridley is very visual, and he sent these looks, he put our faces on these looks.” But as the actors both pointed out, though they may look funny in the movie, it was all in the name of authenticity and character-building. As Damon explained, there was a very specific and practical motivation behind the crude mullet his character wears in the film:
"My character went to war constantly. He wanted to fight. And Ridley liked the idea of the mullet as if I just took a knife and cut the sides of my hair just so I could get my helmet on. That's all I cared about."
Affleck too explained that his own haircut, apparently inspired by Max Von Sydow in the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, was directly related to the character and his nature. He said, "It's about representing power. I am the patriarchy, the power structure, all of these things embodied in this character, and visually, from the way I was dressed, adorned, and the hair."
But there was another motivation for the two actors’ strange hairstyles beyond just representing their characters and who they are. Affleck said Scott also wanted to help the audience forget they are watching two famous and familiar stars. "I hope people don't walk away from the movie focused on that," he said. "But it does serve to help us both feel not like how people generally see us and also a part of this other world.”
Early reviews for The Last Duel have been somewhat mixed – the movie currently has just a 64% score on Rotten Tomatoes – so the jury is still out on whether Affleck, Damon, Scott and company truly succeeded in creating the illusion they were going for. A minor detail like a haircut can of course lend extra believability to a period film like The Last Duel. But such details can also have entirely the wrong effect and accidentally take the audience out of the film. Perhaps The Last Duel will ultimately be remembered as a movie with a stirring plot, stunning visuals and timely themes, and its stars' odd haircuts will only be a footnote to the story. But if the movie falls flat, those bold but questionable haircuts are going to become all anyone recalls about the film.
Source: EW
