People 25 November 2020
Family First Comment: You don’t have to take it from us. Take it from Ben Affleck’s real life experience…
“I had a bad experience with marijuana at 15 — I had a dissociative panic attack. So I only smoked weed if everyone else was smoking, and I had to sort of Bill-Clinton it and fake it. I didn’t really like marijuana.”
Ben Affleck is recalling a “bad experience” he had using marijuana as a teen.
In the new book Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, author Melissa Maerz uncovers behind-the-scenes stories from the cast and crew of the 1993 high school comedy, in which a young Affleck played a supporting character named O’Bannion. Affleck, 48, said he had to “fake it” around his cast mates when they smoked marijuana.
“I had a bad experience with marijuana at 15 — I had a dissociative panic attack,” he said in the book, according to Vanity Fair. “So I only smoked weed if everyone else was smoking, and I had to sort of Bill-Clinton it and fake it. I didn’t really like marijuana.”
(The actor referred to the former president’s 1992 comments, when Clinton said: “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale it, and never tried it again.”)
The book also quotes Affleck as saying that his costars would party often between takes, which took him by surprise at the time.
“I wasn’t a very heavy drinker then. I became an alcoholic much, much later and I’m in recovery now, so that was a whole different time. I was a little nervous, like, ‘Should we be drinking before we’re working tomorrow?’ ” he said. “Some people were actually drinking and stoned at work.”
READ MORE: https://people.com/movies/ben-affleck-bad-experience-marijuana-dazed-and-confused/
