Party of Five

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck radiates a charming, make-it-look-easy, smartalecky screen quality that allows him to play the sort of "average guy" who isn't really very average at all. The role he cowrote and chose for himself in Good Will Hunting is the perfect example: as a construction worker who knows his blue-collar limitations without necessarily having made peace with them, he pulled off the high-wire act of playing abrasive yet likable, ingenuous yet calculating, resigned yet roiling with discontent. Affleck is also aces at projecting the kind of funny, hip, mordant and self-deprecating presence Hollywood thrives on.

Like Steve McQueen before him, he exudes a big-galoot cool that effortlessly takes the curse off gimmicky action scenes. Like McQueen, too, he has looks that offer a fresh alternative to the standard fare of even-featured actor guys and he makes a natural, offbeat screen lover. If he has yet to demonstrate he's got anything like the actor-intensity of DiCaprio, Edward Norton or his buddy Matt Damon, neither has he shown any limits to his possible range.

Affleck was stellar as the cocky Texas high school badass and freshman-basher in Dazed and Confused; there hadn't been a small-town teen character so simultaneously winning, ridiculous and hateful since Harrison Ford's in American Graffiti. In Chasing Amy, he turned a heartbreaking outburst of yearning for an unattainable lesbian into a staple for acting classes and auditions all around town. In Armageddon, his offhanded, self-mocking heroics melted the cheese right off the script. While his part in Shakespeare in Love seemed designed to keep him near offscreen romantic partner Gwyneth Paltrow more than anything else, he was an unmistakably welcome presence whenever the camera found him literally waiting in the wings. Ultimately, he possesses the resources to become one of our more indispensable all-purpose leading men.

But despite success in mainstream Hollywood fare, Affleck is likely to stay close to the indie world. Upcoming, there's Kevin Smith's in-your-face Dogma, in which he and Matt Damon will play angels booted out of heaven. There's also the comedic 200 Cigarettes, in which a bunch of screwed-up, angst-ridden teens and twentysomethings collide on New Year's Eve. In the big-studio comedy/romance-cum-disaster movie Forces of Nature, though, he'll have the chance to become the first male costar since Keanu Reeves and Bill Pullman to light Sandra Bullock's fire, and a major success there would have career-revving implications. Among the follow-up big-studio projects he's rumored to be considering is another pairing with Bruce Willis in the next Die Hard.

Clearly Affleck gets off on variety. Perhaps before too long he'll pump up the pissed-off, wild-hare quality he possesses and play the spectacular bad guy he's got in him. Imagine him as a coolly amoral type like Richard Gere's villain in Internal Affairs. In the meantime, on the evidence of their chemistry in Good Will Hunting, it would be worth it for Affleck and Damon to test Hollywood's good will and brave the sophomore curse to collaborate on either Halfway House, their project about workers in a Boston home for the mentally impaired, or Like a Rock, their buddy project. These two ought to be paired onscreen as often as they've got material to run with. Together, they could be a Paul Newman and Robert Redford for our scrappier, dressed-down, irony-drenched era.

Claire Danes

One of the singular things about Claire Danes is that she comes with a cheering section any aspiring star might envy. Her Industry fans include not just the powers who spotted her in her sensitive underdog TV show, My So-Called Life, but extremely influential fellow actresses who've been where she is and clearly see her as a kindred spirit. Winona Ryder championed Danes for both Little Women and How to Make an American Quilt. Jodie Foster directed her in Home for the Holidays and stumped for her to play Juliet in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Few who go out of their way to mentor so generously are as fully rewarded as Ryder and Foster have been. Danes's Beth in_ Little Women_ was a poised, luminous earth-mother-in-training. And though Home for the Holidays was every bit as messy and irritating as, well, going home for the holidays, Danes's performance in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet made up for it all.

Opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's brashly magnetic Romeo, Danes gave Juliet an incandescent innocence made up of equal parts moonstruck idealism and openheartedness. Nothing there felt calculated, and in an era when so many young actors get ironic and close-to-the-vest when it comes to playing romance.

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Stephen Rebello

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