Casey Affleck wins award, reads out his bad reviews during speech

Casey Affleck hit back at his detractors – well, one detractor in particular – after winning Best Actor at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards this week.

Ben Affleck’s younger brother scored the gong for his Oscar-tipped performance in the drama ‘Manchester By The Sea’, a role which has seen him gain serious heat among critics.

But on hitting the stage to pick up the award, he took the opportunity to read out a few pretty terrible reviews he’d received over the years, according to Deadline.

To make matters rather more awkward, the notices were all penned by David Edelstein, head of the NYFCC, reviewer for New York magazine, and host for the evening.

“I like to read reviews,” he said, especially when they were ‘informed without being esoteric, critical without being snarky or personal’.

Delivering the reviews deadpan, he read out Edelstein’s comments on ‘Triple 9’: “Affleck, though likable, doesn’t have a lot of variety and resorts to chewing gum to give his character through-lines.”

And then from his review of ‘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.

“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.”

“How does one survive such scathing and often accurate criticism?” he added.

“Truth is, there’s never really been anything so horrible said about me that I haven’t either thought of or said to myself.”

According to Deadline reporter Jeremy Gerard, the crowd ‘loved it’, but Edelstein not so much, and later ‘spent perhaps too much time in the final rounds of the night protesting too much, rather than just owning his words and moving on’.

‘Manchester By The Sea’ is out in the UK on January 13.

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