Ben Affleck breaks down the wild twists of Animals

The following article contains spoilers for Animals. Animals is the latest directorial effort from Ben Affleck, and finds the actor-filmmaker in familiar genre territory: the hostage thriller, harkening back to the likes of kidnapping drama Gone Baby Gone and his Oscar-winning, blistering take on the 1979 Iranian embassy crisis Argo . This one centres on the smooth-talking LA mayoral candidate Mark Kimball ( Affleck ), an independent who has smartly schmoozed – and spent – his way into second-place in the election race, mere percentage points behind his popular rival. But then comes the killer twist: on the eve of the vote, his son is seemingly kidnapped, throwing Kimball and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) into a scenario of unimaginable, soul-wrenching terror. It also threatens to destroy their already creaking marriage. “It's not so much an affinity for the hostage drama per se,” Affleck says of his return to this genre space, speaking to GQ over the phone, days before Animals arrives on Netflix. “So much as the notion that there has to be a dichotomy between movies that exist in the genre world, and movies that are serious, or substantive, or provocative.” The idea that movies have to be either think-y or thrilling is “a little bit artificial,” he says. So, with Animals , he blends both: it's an edge-of-your-seat thriller that also takes in modern racial and social tensions, while calling into question the cavernous gap between rich and poor. Case in point: after they've already agreed to deliver a $7 million dollar ransom to the kidnappers, another twist arrives in the reveal that it was actually the son of the Kimballs' Mexican housekeeper Ceci (Adriana Paz) snatched in a case of mistaken identity. Suddenly, the Kimballs are a little less happy to open their wallets. (Not that Kimball is totally without motivation to shell out the cash: he needs the latino vote to win the election, and buying the freedom of a kidnapped latino child would sure make for good publicity.) Meanwhile, Gillian Anderson turns up as a Mr Wolf-style fixer, leading the increasingly tense negotiations. Largely confined to the claustrophobia of the Kimballs' lavish home, Animals is a taut throwback thriller – it feels incredibly '90s coded – that'll keep you fixed to your screen for all of its 106 minutes. We spoke to Affleck about making Animals , the timeliness of the movie's LA mayoral race, and whether, as it's implied at the end, Mark Kimball would ever run for president. GQ : In terms of the tension and action, it feels like Animals harkens back to a lot of those classic '90s thrillers. Did you have that sort of retro reference in mind? Ben Affleck: Certainly that was the period of time [where] I was probably most impressionable, seeing movies and being inspired to be in them. I don’t think we can help but be shaped by the formative, meaningful things that we saw in that period of our lives. I look at the ‘70s as well as a period that relied on very human dramas, as opposed to high-concept stuff. I feel like I do best telling stories about people and how they behave... in difficult situations. And trying to let the action or the high-stakes conflict manifest itself in very human terms, because I think the way that people behave is the most interesting aspect of the story. It feels very zeitgeisty: it’s a film about a Los Angeles mayor, and the IRL election race is hotting up right now . Why did you choose to make Mark an independent candidate in an LA election? You know, I wish that I could take credit for tapping into the zeitgeist. But I actually envisioned and started writing this version of the story a little bit prior to the presidential election. So I couldn't have envisioned that the immigration issue would take on the kind of cultural prominence that it did. And I don’t have any particular satisfaction in that – it’s sort of like writing a disaster movie, and then that disaster actually unfolds. It would be awfully selfish to go, “Oh look, what good luck for me.” But when we were shooting it, we had the very surreal experience of having to go to a location one day, and then being told “no, you can't shoot here.” There was an ICE raid. So it was kind of happening in real time – as we were shooting it. It certainly lent a sense of urgency and responsibility to the movie. And in terms of the mayoral race, I didn't know. Obviously, I understood there would be mayoral election, and the mayoral elections in Los Angeles had already taken on a broader cultural sort of importance, and they had become kind of divisive. I couldn't imagine that there would be an independent candidate like Spencer Pratt who would enter the race. Do you think Mark, as a politician and a human, is virtue signalling – or genuinely virtuous? I don’t really think he knows what the difference is. It becomes so blurred a line, and we’ve so internalised the notion – or necessity – to signal various virtues that I think he spent his life, you know, building a resume that’s meant to signal virtues to everybody. So it’s almost meaningless in some ways. And it does strike me as artificial... He's got a kind of a dilettante resume, where he learns some Spanish and, 'I'll appeal to the Latin voters.' But at the end of the day, it begs the question: do you stand for anything? What really are your beliefs? I think [he's] a character who doesn't even know what he really believes in until the end, and the answer is not particularly idealised. Hopefully this is a movie that feels honest to the audience. They draw their own conclusions and think to themselves, “that probably is how it would work,” and by connecting to the individuals in the story, [we were] able to tell a story about a system and a power structure without being didactic, or preachy, or pedantic. Animals is obviously about this ransom scenario, but it's just as much about the complexity of marriage. The connection between both themes is having to negotiate and compromise and manage crises together. I think that's definitely part of it. I think the other part of it is [that] within, at least, certain cultural spheres, we've become accustomed to virtue signalling [not only] broadly and publicly, but sort of virtue signalling to one another. This is a movie where, within the marriage, they're both playing certain roles that are kind of expected, and maybe chafing somewhat against those in the ways in which they feel are inconsistent with their own personal needs. Whether right or wrong, it's not a movie that seeks to, or wants to invite judgment. I think you can’t stop people from making their own judgments. But what I thought was interesting was, you know, the similarities between what marriage can become and what being a politician is, or what even existence is in the contemporary world – where we identify with a set of prefabricated beliefs and a shared set of virtues, and we're expected to line up with those, and there really isn't a lot of room for nuance or complexity. Yeah, absolutely. The two sons wear the Halloween masks, but I feel like they're the only ones not wearing the kind of metaphorical masks. It is a movie about what happens, I think almost quite literally, when the mask comes off. The masks that we wear in marriage, the mask we wear in our public life. You cast Kerry Washington, who is fantastic as Kimball's wife Abby. She has this IRL experience in activism, but also has acted in crisis management scenarios on the TV show Scandal . Is that what made her so perfect? All those things definitely, and her evident talent, and also frankly her intelligence and formidability. If you're going to tell a marriage story, you know you've got to have two substantive characters with some depth, and on whom the audience can project some of their own experiences and history. And I needed somebody who was kind of a co-author – we sort of built the backstory of this marriage together. And that was a process that kind of involved being vulnerable with one another, and sharing some kind of insights about marriage, and some of the difficulties that come with that. Not in the sense that we said, “Oh, in my marriage X happened, or Y happened,” but rather the kinds of things that tend to happen – the sorts of feelings that might emerge. And then building on this fictional story. [We also explored] the particular insecurities associated with an interracial relationship – and what does that look like? This is a movie about inviting the audience into rooms that they might not otherwise be invited into. We talk differently to people according to who the immediate audience is. For example, Adriana and Luis’s characters present very differently in front of their bosses than they do when they're with one another. And Kerry [Abigail] and I talk differently, for example, about them and when they're not there. I know a lot of people have asked you if you would run for mayor. But I'm interested instead: Mark hints at these presidential ambitions. Do you think he would actually run for it? Would he fare well? And what would he stand for? I think Mark is in some ways the sort of person that would end up being encouraged to run for president, and is the sort of person for whom that would be very appealing. The fact of the story [he tells at the end, about shooting the kidnapper] even though it's not true, as having been the guy who stood up to crime... In this day and age, ironically, would [make for] a very appealing political candidate. I think if somebody had some sort of incident where they were the victim of some crime and shot somebody, we live in a day and age where everyone would rush to them and say, “Why wouldn’t you run for president?” Animals is now on Netflix.