Ben Affleck has revealed an unexpected behind-the-scenes detail from Armageddon, sharing that he was severely unwell while filming one of the film’s most emotional moments with Bruce Willis.
Speaking to Fox 32 Chicago, the actor said he was suffering from food poisoning when he shot the goodbye scene between AJ Frost and Harry Stamper. At the time, Affleck admitted, he didn’t feel confident enough to step away from work despite his condition. “I wasn’t an experienced enough actor to know that you can just pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m too sick to work today,’” he said. Instead, he pushed through the shoot — even though it meant “vomiting between takes”.
Looking back, Affleck joked that his physical discomfort may have actually enhanced his performance, quipping that it “probably made the scene better.”
The moment he refers to is a key emotional beat in Michael Bay’s 1998 disaster epic, in which AJ bids farewell to Willis’ Harry Stamper, a veteran oil driller who sacrifices himself to manually detonate a bomb and save Earth from a massive, planet-threatening asteroid.
Armageddon featured a large ensemble cast including Liv Tyler, Billy Bob Thornton, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson and Michael Clarke Duncan. The film follows a group of roughneck deep-core drillers recruited by NASA for a near-impossible mission to stop an asteroid the size of Texas from colliding with Earth.
Despite drawing mixed responses from critics, the film was a box office juggernaut, finishing as the highest-grossing release of 1998 and becoming Touchstone Pictures’ most successful film at the time.
Affleck also recently reflected on the experience while reconnecting with Buscemi at the premiere of his new Netflix film, The Rip. The encounter, he said, brought back vivid memories of Armageddon. “We were reminiscing about that movie and thinking about how that was the weirdest, kind of wonderful, strange, otherworldly movie experience,” he recalled.
