Ben Affleck recently told Fox 32 Chicago that he contracted food poisoning while filming his emotional farewell scene with Bruce Willis for the 1998 disaster blockbuster Armageddon.
“I had food poisoning when we shot that scene,” Affleck said. “At the time, I wasn’t experienced enough as an actor to pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sick and can’t work today.’ I was like, ‘I’d better come in.’ So I went and it was literally the only time in my life that I threw up between takes. ”
Affleck laughed and added that his distressed state “probably made the scene better.”
In the scene in question, Affleck’s oilman A.J. Frost bids farewell to Harry Stamper, a deep-nuclear oil driller played by Willis, who sacrifices himself to manually detonate a bomb to destroy an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
Directed by Michael Bay, the cast also includes Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Will Patton, Steve Buscemi, William Fichtner, Owen Wilson, and Michael Clarke Duncan.
Affleck recalled seeing Buscemi at the premiere of his new Netflix film, The Rip, and said memories of the movie flooded into his head.
He said, “We actually saw Steve Buscemi last night at the premiere of ‘The Rip,’ and we were thinking about that movie and what a weird, wonderful, weird, otherworldly movie experience it was.”
