TORONTO -- This year marked Casey Affleck's return to the big screen after the Oscar-nominated star took a break from acting for a while.
In recent months, his Sundance Film Festival hit "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" had a slow rollout in select theatres internationally, and this Friday he can be seen in North American cinemas as a struggling Iraq war vet in "Out of the Furnace."
The projects come three years after Affleck released his directorial effort, the controversial mockumentary "I'm Still Here," in which a dishevelled Joaquin Phoenix pretended he was quitting his Oscar-nominated acting career to become a hip-hop artist.
The film was maligned for duping audiences into thinking it was real, and Affleck admits "it was risky in its style" and also a risk for his own acting career as it "sucked up a good deal" of his time and kept him from doing onscreen projects.
"You take a break in Hollywood, you don't act in something for a couple of years, people just forget about you. That's a lifetime in Hollywood almost, so it's hard to bounce back from that," said the 38-year-old, who got an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in 2007's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
"I had just done 'The Assassination of Jesse James' ... and then after that I did 'Gone Baby Gone.' So I had completely turned a corner in my career, I guess, and then I stopped to go make ('I'm Still Here') for two years, and I just took a lot of time off, a lot of time away."
That's not to say he regrets making "I'm Still Here."
"I mean, regret seems pointless," Affleck said in a recent telephone interview. "It's not a useful emotion really, although it's always there sort of lingering around. If you're willing to go sit on the stoop with regret, it'll hang out with you, but it's a waste of time.
"So it didn't perform that well, but neither did 'Jesse James,' and I love that movie. So often movies don't perform well," he added. "Life goes on, you know. I feel pretty blessed to just be doing this.
"And look at me now, you know, I get to work with Christian Bale, Scott Cooper and Forest Whitaker and Woody Harrelson and on and on and on. What could be better? So there were some challenges with that movie, but I seemed to have weathered them, for now anyway, and I'm grateful for what I've got."
Affleck was referring to the all-star team behind the gritty drama "Out of the Furnace," which is directed by Cooper, who helmed and co-wrote the 2009 Oscar-winning film "Crazy Heart."
Cooper also co-wrote the "Out of the Furnace" script with Brad Ingelsby. Producers include Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott.
Bale stars as Russell Baze, a hard-working steel mill employee in poverty-stricken Braddock, Penn., during the 2008 economic downturn.
Affleck deftly plays his troubled younger brother, Rodney, an Iraq war vet who can't find work when he returns home from duty. Indebted to shady characters, he turns to gambling and underground fighting to make a quick buck, forcing his brother to look out for his wellbeing.
Harrelson brings chills as Harlan DeGroat, vicious leader of a backwoods crime ring in the New Jersey Ramapo Mountains. Whitaker plays a cop. Other cast members include Willem Dafoe as a bookie, Zoe Saldana as Russell's girlfriend and Sam Shepard as the brothers' uncle.
Affleck said after he made "I'm Still Here," he wasn't reading scripts that he really responded to, but he found "Out of the Furnace" to have many different layers and "got really excited."
Three months later, he was on the set in Braddock.
"Oh God, it was invigorating and scary and exciting," said Affleck, when asked what it felt like to return to work in front of the camera again.
"Being able to work with such a group of people was a blessing. I felt very supported. With Christian and Scott and Woody and Forest and Willem Dafoe and Sam Shepard and Zoe, it feels like there's no way that the movie and myself would dip below a certain level.
"I kind of felt like there was a bit of a safety net."
Affleck said he did research into post-traumatic stress disorder, which afflicts his character. He also watched documentaries and spoke with war vets. He also trained to get in the right physical shape for his fighting matches.
Shooting in Braddock really brought home the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.
"That community is so devastated right now," said Affleck, brother of Oscar-winning actor/director Ben Affleck.
"There's not a lot to hang out with there. Largely only one in every, oh I don't know, dozen homes is actually occupied, and everything is boarded up and abandoned. It's practically a ghost town. The mills are closed, there's one tiny bar. It does have a mayor and he's trying his hardest to bring it back to life."
Affleck will be seen onscreen again in the new year, when Christopher Nolan's star-packed sci-fi drama "Interstellar" his theatres.
And he wants to put on his filmmaking hat again for "Aardvark Art's Ark," an animated family film he wrote and plans to executive produce. The story features animals who didn't make it onto Noah's Ark.
"I want to do some things that my kids can watch before they're 18," Affleck, a father of two, said with a laugh. "So I'm trying."
