©Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Press Conference with Actors Ben Affleck, Jon Bernthal, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Daniela Pineda and Director/Executive Producer Gavin O’Connor

Q :  I am so excited to moderate this virtual press conference for The Accountant 2. I’m joined today by producer and star Ben Affleck, star Jon Bernthal, director and executive producer Gavin O’Connor, and stars Cynthia Addai-Robinson, and Daniela Pineda. Hello everyone, and welcome.

Okay, so Ben, I’m going to start with you on this one because I was looking over your filmography. You have not done a ton of sequels, honestly, outside of like maybe one role, but I feel like maybe this one was that movie that everyone maybe harasses you at the grocery store about, like, “Hey, we want more,” and so you had to come back. So talk a little bit about bringing Gavin back and why you wanted to do one of your very rare sequels.

BEN AFFLECK: Well, first of all, you’re right, this is a movie where after the first one, and it was successful and I was really proud of it, but it had a longer life in terms of like the just real-life feedback that I get from people, what movies they would mention when they come up to me, and so I definitely was aware like, “Oh, wow, that movie seems to still be being watched.” I think it’s also a function of the fact that like streaming really started to take off after this movie, so people had the opportunity to pick what movie they’re going to watch, that sort of thing.

And also, I love this character. I really enjoyed playing it. Gavin and I both very much were drawn to the idea of bringing John back and expanding on that because we both really were like, “This guy’s fabulous,” and we love it, and we, I think, both felt like there was a lot more to do. And the only thing that, I think, that I would rephrase from your question is like they really brought me back.

Bill and Gavin spent a lot of time in the intervening years developing and putting together in a quite typical of Gavin, meticulous, patient, detail-oriented, character-driven way, what it could be, because both were quite mindful of like not wanting to repeat it, not wanting to just, you know, “Hey, they like the first one. Let’s just figure something out and do another one.” So everything about it was appealing to me.

Q : I love that. And Gavin, that brings me right to the next question for you. I think it’s almost even rare sometimes for the director to come back, but I guess as Ben said, you had been thinking about this for a while. When did you decide what aspects of the first one you wanted to carry over and then how you wanted to sort of change it up in the second installment?

GAVIN O’CONNOR: Just a lot of conversations with Bill in regard to there was certain DNA that it was important to preserve, and then after that, it was a lot of left turns and just try to refill the tank in a very different way. I know we wanted to recycle the same thing that we did in the first film, so it was just a matter of how do we just start recreating the character in a way that is putting him on a different journey, integrating Brax, wanted to bring Cynthia back. We knew the key in the ignition was to kill Ray because I wanted it to be personal for both of these guys.

And most importantly, and we had these conversations, I just wanted to make a movie that was fun and entertaining and put people in the seats and go to a movie theater and the lights come down and have a communal experience where they can walk out of the theater and go, “Man, that was a fucking ball. That was a great time at the movies,” and that’s really what we were going for.

Q : I mean, you’ve already gotten that sort of stamp of approval. It won the Audience Award at South by Southwest. And the one thing I was sort of struck by when I was there was just how funny it was and how much you played up the comedy in this one, and I will say, Jon, sir, your character and your dynamic between your character and Ben was a lot of that comedy. What was that like for you, and when did they tell you that this was going to be much more of an odd couple brotherly love but also sort of like antagonistic sort of a version the second time around?

JON BERNTHAL: You know, I don’t know that I was ever really told that. I don’t know that… Look, it was-

BEN AFFLECK: Bait-and-switch?

JON BERNTHAL: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. I was like, “What?” But look, Bill’s writing is so unbelievably strong, and I think… Gavin and I, we’re very close, and you work with Gavin, he’s always going to whittle it down and try to get to the truth of the character and there’s no stone left unturned. It was a real thrill for me to get back, and I think with Ben, it just kind of happened that way. I mean, it’s there, but it was very much supported by Gavin to sort of let moments linger and let it exist naturally and play the moments in between the beats. He’s unbelievably funny and, it sounds corny, he’s just mastered this character in such a way that you can… There’s just so many little moments of truth that are going on that you love but can also drive you crazy from the right point of view, and I feel like I was really let off the leash to have a real opinion about that.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: You know, I don’t think we ever said like, “Oh, it has to be funny.” When I say I wanted the movie to be fun and entertaining, I mean, Jon and I had so many sit downs where we would just do, you know, dissecting the character and what’s the intention in this scene, but once you just put these guys together, they both have specific wants, and if you’re not getting your want, and both of these guys, their characters are slightly bonkers in certain ways, so if they’re not getting their wants, it just… If you just let them do their thing, it was such a fertile kind of environment for them just in the scenes that it just created…

JON BERNTHAL: You never told us to be funny.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: The reason I think it works is because they weren’t trying to be funny. No one was trying to be funny. They were so ingrained in their characters. And they had very specific wants, and if you’re not getting that, it’s like banging your head against the wall. And it just-

BEN AFFLECK: Also, Jon took pleasure in torturing. So that was really…

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Q : Oh my God.

BEN AFFLECK: Which is funny if it’s not you.

Q : I’m not going to lie, I would watch it every day. So your suffering was quite entertaining. I’m so sorry. It was quite entertaining. This is not to say that the film is not the same high-octane action movie that the first one was with a gripping sort of like thrilling storyline. And Cynthia, what I think is so interesting, even your character changed so much because with JK Simmons’ character sort of being a catalyst, your character was so much more uncomfortable with what Matt was doing, and I loved how, again, like I feel like you all were just putting antagonistic people around him at every turn in this one, but hers was way more like, “Yeah, I am a federal officer and I can’t do that.” So what about the character did you get to explore this time around that you really sort of enjoyed?

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: Yeah, I mean, I think I always viewed Marybeth as sort of the entry point for the audience because she’s sort of observing and seeing all these things unfold around her and reacting in kind, and you know, myself as an actor, same thing. I think back to working on the first movie. I was nervous. I was kind of out of my depth in a way just trying to kind of present as if I wasn’t, which I think for Marybeth it was a similar type of situation, and here we are eight years later, when we started on the sequel, and Marybeth has evolved, grown, she’s in this sort of elevated position within the Treasury Department, and for myself as a person and an actor, I felt like I had also grown, and it was like, “All right, I’m going to be returning to a situation that’s familiar. I feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more confident.”

And so that was really nice for me to kind of feel like, “Okay, I’m feeling like I can handle what I’m now getting thrown at me,” which is, again, this dynamic with Ben and Jon’s characters and just kind of, again, being that sort of, for the audience, that point of entry. So all of their shenanigans, I also got to just sort of bear witness to and be like, “All right, these guys are kind of crazy and they’re also kind of challenging my view of how to serve justice really.”

Q : Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: I mean, the secret of this movie is that Cynthia is the protagonist really. And she’s the lead in the movie. She is the entree for the audience, which means we get to play character parts, and there is a kind of relief from not having to carry a certain… There are a whole bunch of expectations and stuff that go with being the lead in the movie because, as Cynthia says, the audience is really projecting themselves onto you.

And so we’re like a dual-aggravant in some ways to her, and if you look at the math of the story, it’s about her being brought into this, seeing this person be killed, trying to find out what it was and what she has to go through to get there and the resolution of her story, and that’s something that I find very artful and interesting, where this person is the lead of the movie and you have these dual character actors in there. So that affords Jon and I the luxury of doing the sort of two-hander as you call odd couple thing.

Q : A very good one. And then Daniella, I feel like your character, we don’t want to give too much away, but even from the trailer, we can gather that she is just about to wreak a ton of havoc.

DANIELA PINEDA: A barrel of laughs.

Q : Yeah.

DANIELA PINEDA: Just a barrel of laughs, all the comedy really.

Q : Fierce, fierce. Listen.

DANIELA PINEDA: Yeah.

©Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Q : But I was really actually happy to see that, look, the gentlemen are bringing back the action, but there’s a heightened level of female action in this movie that I think is going to go down in history as some of the best I’ve seen on screen. But what was that like for you? Again, no stranger to action, but I don’t think you’ve done this much physicality on screen yet.

DANIELA PINEDA: No, I would say it was definitely next level. I mean, it’s not necessarily a character you see all the time. I feel like it’s kind of changing a bit. I saw a video the other day of these two American eagle chicks in a nest and one of the siblings just takes out the littler one, takes out the nest. I was like, “Oh, hey, I know that girl. That’s on ice.”

But at the same time, you want to see that eagle hunt and you want to see that eagle fly, and there is something really compelling about watching a predator do their thing. At the same time, I felt like there’s more to her, there’s more layers there. So she’s not just a stone-cold killer, and it’s the type of roles that I would like to see more women get to play. They’re certainly here in the real world, you know? And I love to beat the shit out of Cynthia. But we were hugging in between takes and it was nice.

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: Yeah.

DANIELA PINEDA: I got really lucky I had a good partner.

Q : Listen, let’s not put anything. The minute I saw both of y’all in the trailer, I was like, “That’s going to be good,” whatever that’s like-

DANIELA PINEDA: It was fun, it was fun, but she’ll tell you it was brutal.

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: It is pretty good, and what’s very satisfying is we’ve now sort of had opportunities to see the movie with audiences, and when you hear an audience audibly gasp, then you know you’re doing something right, because it means that the stakes and how invested people are in these characters, they are literally leaning forward, and with each blow, each hit it’s like… So I think that’s like a nice vote of confidence to hear those gasps.

Q : And then for the gentleman, I mean, Gavin, Warrior, Pride and Glory, Batman, and The Punisher, action is nothing new, but I feel like with The Accountant, because it is so visceral and it is so gory and bloody and real-life, what is the aspect of doing action for this movie that sort of sets it apart? And Ben, I’ll start with you.

BEN AFFLECK: I mean, that’s really… Look, to me, what makes it interesting and what made me think that we could do something that would actually connect with an audience in the sense that they feel something for what’s happening is because Gavin’s approach is always about, it’s not about this is a shot where visually it looks cool because of X, Y, and Z elements, and we’re going to construct it in such a way, and then you have to reverse engineer why in the world you would be doing something that would lead you to that place, it’s always driven from like what does each character want, why are they doing this. There’s a grounded reason for it, and then his gift is to take that and make that visually compelling.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: Yeah, and not try to make it feel stunty or some of these, we can cite action movies that are great but it just feels like the action is in front of the characters, and for us, and the same with the girls, we were always coming from characters. So like what we were always tracking when we got to the third act was like, “How are these guys working together? How are they now united?” We knew what the stakes were, we knew what they wanted, so inside of the action and the choreography, really it was about the emotional line between the two brothers and how are they going to try to accomplish this together, and that was really what the conversations were about. The action is like dance, right? It’s just doing it in beats. But action is an emotional, and disposable violence, who cares about, right? So it was really evoking emotion because you care about the characters.

©Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

Q : I mean, that’s one of the things. I think some of the action sequences with your character, Jon, are just so much more impactful because of the sort of conflict, or resolution, or sort of like celebratory moments that you and Ben’s character are having together. But I’d be curious for you, that sort of emotional arc that your character goes through in this one, which I don’t think people would necessarily expect, how did you approach that and how did you balance it with the very demanding action sequences that you had to do?

JON BERNTHAL: Look, you can’t lie in a fight, you know? You just can’t lie. What you want is right there, so if you’re going for it, you just got to know what you’re going for and why you’re going for it. I think more than any director I’ve ever worked with, Gavin has an appetite, and an availability, and a hunger to go back and to really get into what makes these guys tick. He’ll talk to you as long as you want to talk to him about where these guys came from.

And what’s so beautiful about this being a second film and I think for me with Brax, he’s really sort of shrouded in mystery in the first one. There was a point you really don’t know too much about him, but you have these amazing flashbacks to see how these two boys were raised and what their relationship was with their dad, and it really is the crux of what is really bothering both of them and what’s really bothering Brax, the roles that we’ve always filled for each other, getting each other’s back, having to be there for each other, the lack of being there for each other. So then for it to sort of culminate, it just doesn’t culminate just in a gunfight, it culminates in, “Hey, I’m there for you. I’m getting your back, you’re getting mine. We’re joined forever,” and it’s a way, for lack of a better word, of showing how much you love somebody, and violence can actually be that sometimes.

Q : Definitely. One of the things too I think folks are going to be really excited when they get a chance to see this on April 25th is the fact that BEN AFFLECK, I’m just going to go ahead and say it, you line dance, like I didn’t expect to see that.

BEN AFFLECK: America doesn’t expect it. America wasn’t asking for it, but they’re going to get it-

JON BERNTHAL: We’re getting it.

BEN AFFLECK: And we’ll see what happens.

JON BERNTHAL: Let’s go.

BEN AFFLECK: That’s what I mean when you say big swing. That was one of the fun things about this thing, the idea that here’s a guy who’s trying to figure out, he wants to have a relationship with a woman, he’s trying to figure out how to do that, like how to put yourself out there. He’s not comfortable extending himself, he doesn’t really know how to flirt exactly, he’s not comfortable. Like so many of us, it’s not easy for anyone figuring out relationships, particularly the very early part where you’re trying to gauge like, “What does this signal mean? Is this person looking at me? Do they like me? Am I going to humiliate myself if I go over there?”

And what he does is kind of a lovely thing, which is he uses something that he’s comfortable with, which in that case is the ability to recognize and identify the pattern of line dancing, because it is so structured and patterned, to participate in this, and it’s the perfect way that he’s comfortable to stand next to this woman who he’s attracted to and wants to connect with, because it’s kind of like parallel play with little kids. You don’t have to look at somebody and engage them, but you get to be with them and do something next to them, and he finds a way that he’s comfortable doing that. And it required, yeah, a lot of me. I probably am not going to get a lot more demands from my line dancing work. I don’t know. The phone hasn’t rung yet. But it was really fun to…

I think what’s charming about it is when somebody puts themselves out there to do something, at least I hope, that they’re not necessarily great at, but they’re trying, and I mean really, at the end of the day, that’s sort of what any of us can do. Some of us are great at things, like Jon, the fighting comes easy to him. The action scenes with him is sort of like playing in a basketball movie and this guy’s, you’re like, “Oh, you played professional basketball. Okay, great.” Whereas like these women, the action, like Cynthia and Daniella, they trained like crazy and brought incredible aptitude.

Those fight scenes are a function of tremendous commitment, and dedication, and emotional perseverance that was astonishing. And for me, I’m coming at this line dancing thing like I don’t really have the natural gifts, but I’m willing to try, you know? I would say they did a hell of a lot better with the action than I did with the line dancing. Luckily for me, it wasn’t supposed to be good, at least-

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: I thought it was great.

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: Yeah, don’t sell yourself short. I thought it was great.

Q : Thank you.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: The other thing about the scene that we were trying to accomplish that was really important is obviously there was that happening, but it was also like we just left the plot of the movie. It was like, “Are we going to leave the plot for a while? What’s going to go happen?” Because that whole scene is really about the brothers. They’ve been in all this conflict driving up to that scene, and then at the end of the scene on the Airstream, he says, “Let’s go get drunk.” And then that scene became, they’re still kind of in conflict trying to figure, but once he goes to dance, Brax is like, that started to unite the two brothers, and it was just baby steps to get these guys there. So that was the other thing we were trying to-

BEN AFFLECK: And anchors the audience having him celebrate for his brother-

GAVIN O’CONNOR: Totally, totally.

BEN AFFLECK: … that’s where you’re connecting to.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: Yes. “Yeah, that’s my big brother up there.” It’s beautiful.

JACQUELINE COLEY (Moderator): Jon, not to say that you’re not a great actor, but were you literally looking on to Ben dancing, doing the cheerleader role, or was it just-\

BEN AFFLECK: I don’t do any of my off-camera ever with the other performers. When I’m done, I leave the set.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: He was in the Airstream-

BEN AFFLECK: You can look at a fucking tennis ball.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: We saw taillights.

BEN AFFLECK: I am finished with you. I don’t need… You know what? And that’s just the way it goes.

JON BERNTHAL: I’m telling you, I was so happy that day. Watching him, I could not-

GAVIN O’CONNOR: You were very concerned.

JON BERNTHAL: I was like, “This scene-

GAVIN O’CONNOR: You never got to see my boy. You never got-

JON BERNTHAL: “… will never work.” I was like, “There’s no way-

GAVIN O’CONNOR: He never got to see it.

JON BERNTHAL: “… this is going to work. What does this scene have to do with anything?” And it was, as soon as I saw him go out there, and I was singing that song, I mean, I was like, I love that song, I love that. It was so good, and it was like-

BEN AFFLECK: I’m glad you didn’t tell me when I got there this morning like, “This isn’t good enough.”

GAVIN O’CONNOR: No, no. If you asked-

JON BERNTHAL: “This is a disaster.”

GAVIN O’CONNOR: You asked Jon before we shot that scene. He was saying, “This is going to get cut from the movie.”

JON BERNTHAL: “There’s no way this is making the movie.”

GAVIN O’CONNOR: “There’s no way this is making-“

JON BERNTHAL: “There’s no way.” I was like, “Why are we even here?” Yeah, yeah.

DANIELA PINEDA: Highlight of the whole movie.

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s funny because I thought you were going to be good in the movie, but…

Q : Okay. Before Amazon MGM sends a sniper for me quite literally, I’m going to end it here. And I wanted to talk so much more. I wanted to talk about the locations, I wanted to talk about the action sequence. Jon, I just really want to ask you about Dungeons and Dragons and whether or not you’ve played yet. But we don’t have enough time. So I just want to thank the incredible cast and filmmakers of The Accountant 2, and again, remind all of you, it will be in theaters globally April 25th. I hope that I didn’t miss anything else. Thank you all very much.

BEN AFFLECK: Thanks very much.

GAVIN O’CONNOR: Thank you.

JON BERNTHAL: Thank you so much.

DANIELA PINEDA: Thank you.

CYNTHIA ADDAI-ROBINSON: Thank you.

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Here’s the trailer of the film.