Ben Affleck brings advertising passion to Matt Damon and David Beckham's Stella spot

So this is where Matt Damon was hiding when the DunKings needed him. It turns out, his buddy Ben Affleck had other ideas in mind for Damon on Super Bowl Sunday. Like a master general, he rearranged the troops—Jeremy Strong here, Damon and David Beckham there—to maximize advertising potential. No matter who wins the football game, Affleck wins the night. It's diabolical genius at work. 

Yes, Affleck is behind two Super Bowl spots, the first of which aired a teaser during the Grammy Awards. Jeremy Strong, a fellow Boston area native, poked fun at his reputation as a hyper-serious method actor preparing (via "the bean method") to join the DunKings. "Should've paid for Matt," Casey Affleck complains in the Dunkin' clip. 



But Damon, a veteran DunKing, had other Super Bowl business in a Stella Artois ad directed by his childhood friend. In this commercial, Stella spokesman David Beckham learns he has a long-lost twin living in America. Beckham travels "other David's" home, gets perplexed by the concept of Buffalo wings, and discovers that he and his brother share a penchant for powerful kicks and, of course, Belgian pilsner.  

Asked how Affleck is as a director, Damon joked that "he's terrible" in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, because we live in an age where Super Bowl commercials warrant full media profiles. "Obviously, I grew up with him, so these things take on the feeling of like you’re just in your backyard and one of you has a camera, and you’re messing around. But as David pointed out, you look around and you’ve got a world class cinematographer [the spot was filmed by Academy Award winner Bob Richardson] and the best crew… So things run incredibly professionally, even though you wouldn’t be able to tell it from looking at the actors," Damon said. "The way Ben shoots, it's pretty loose in the sense that there's a script and a structure, and we know what we're doing, but there's a lot of ad-libbing, there's a lot of improvisation. He's yelling out lines, we're trying stuff out, trying to keep a straight face and so you have to be somewhat nimble."

Affleck himself is, of course, an award-winning filmmaker ("I never did no research on nothing, and look where I'm at," he jokes about his own success in the DunKings teaser). But he's far from the only prestigious Hollywood director to be seduced by marketing money. Greta Gerwig is doing UberEats commercials this year. Even Martin Scorsese has done ads, both in front of and behind the camera. There is (apparently) no shame in the game, and Affleck has earned himself the rare distinction of having two different Super Bowl ads in one year. That's real Hollywood star power!