With director Gavin O'Connor’s The Accountant opening this weekend in theaters everywhere, last week I sat down with Ben Affleck and O'Connor for an exclusive video interview. If you’ve seen in my interviews, sometimes I ask serious questions about the movie. Other times I might play a game. But for this one I went in with a few objectives: make both of them laugh a lot while talking about Tom Brady, Star Wars, comic books, and Affleck’s Batman movie. Happy to report mission accomplished.

Before going any further I need to give you a bit of background. A few days before my interview, Affleck, Matt Damon and Tom Brady released a very funny video to raise money for some great charities and the winner would join the three of them for pizza and beer in Boston. In the video (which you can watch below), Damon and Affleck argue about who is closer with Brady and it’s really well done.

Since Affleck is a huge Boston sports fan, I figured why not incorporate Brady in the interview by asking if it was true that to get closer to him Affleck was letting Brady pick his movie roles. In addition I asked if he did the role to have a character tougher than Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne, if the Star Wars lightsaber featured in the film had an ulterior purpose, why they put Action Comics Number One instead of Batman in the film, why they both wanted to make this movie, and Affleck’s reason for wanting Deathstroke to be the villain in his Batman movie. Check out the interview below.

For those unfamiliar with The Accountant, the film is about a math whiz that works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. I don’t want to spoil any of the twists and turns so I’ll just say the film is a lot more than that one-liner. You can watch the trailer here. The film also stars Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Jeffrey Tambor, and John Lithgow.

 

Here’s the official synopsis for The Accountant:

Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) is a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King (J.K. Simmons), starting to close in, Christian takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk (Anna Kendrick) has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars. But as Christian uncooks the books and gets closer to the truth, it is the body count that starts to rise.