As the actor picked up the Best Actor at the Baftas, MR PORTER looks back at some of his best movie roles to date.

Last night, at the Bafta Film Awards at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Mr Casey Affleck won Best Actor for his role as a grieving janitor in Manchester By The Sea. A mesmeric accumulation of subtext upon subtext, it is his most complete performance so far. Mr Affleck is not without his detractors (allegations of sexual impropriety by two ex-colleagues were settled last year), but his win vindicates subtlety and watchfulness for a man with a less glamorous background than the surname suggests (his acceptance speech revealed he got into acting to cope with his mum’s alcoholism). With increasing composure, he has attuned the sleepy eyes, reedy voice and slightly manic smile to different parts representing a fractured nation, expansively photographed hinterlands and backwaters with the odd life-art overlap. Here, beyond Manchester By The Sea, are his five most important performances to date.

2002

After minor roles in Ocean’s Eleven and To Die For (the latter opposite Mr Joaquin Phoenix, whom he’d later direct in I’m Still Here), he reunited with Good Will Hunting’s Mr Matt Damon and director Mr Gus Van Sant on a script the three wrote together. Described by Mr Van Sant as “Béla Tarr fused with Tomb Raider”, it is a strange, meditative ramble in which two men called Gerry get lost on a desert hike, a concentrated shot of arthouse full of wordless walking. The landscapes, like the New Mexico painted by Ms Georgia O’Keeffe, were the first to externalise Mr Affleck’s inner mysteries.

2007

Opposite a career-best Mr Brad Pitt in one of the finest English-language films of the century so far, Mr Affleck is quite astonishing – supple, unnerving, manipulative, voyeuristic, weasel-like and vividly desperate. Enriched by Mr Nick Cave’s dreamy score and Mr Andrew Dominik’s gauzy cinematography, it’s a slow-burn monument to myth-making, the ambiguities of fame and the piteous rage of the hanger-on. The film teems with memorable scenes – Ford’s obsessive list of what he and Jesse have in common; the ghoulish re-enactments with Mr Sam Rockwell at the theatre ­– but the build-up to the murder in particular electrifies, especially the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hand-quiver when Ford fears Jesse is onto him. Though No Country For Old Men’s Mr Javier Bardem beat him to that year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar, both performances reinvented the villain in American cinema.

2007

Ten years on from Good Will Hunting, 2007 was a momentous year for the brothers Affleck and marked the start of brother Ben’s renaissance as a weighty writer-director. Like Zodiac, Mr David Fincher’s mystery released the same year, Gone Baby Gone was a neo-noir with no easy answers and a prelude to the real-crime intricacies of Making A Murderer. Casey played a decent private investigator in a demythologised Boston, surrounded by a classy cast (Mr Morgan Freeman, Ms Amy Ryan, Mr Ed Harris, Mr Michael K Williams). An unusual beta-lead, he holds his own in meaty ding-dongs with Mr Harris and shows a glimmer of his potential for violence when he kills a child abuser.

2010

The anti-Gone Baby Gone. Based on a book Mr Stanley Kubrick called “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”, the film attracted controversy for its sustained graphic violence against women. Director Mr Michael Winterbottom, who often deals in repetitious extremes (hardcore sex in 9 Songs; impressions in The Trip), allowed the actor to find a new range and darkness with the Texan policeman as serial killer. Empire praised Mr Affleck as “disturbingly absolute… possessing a cool-eyed contempt so profound it goes beyond mere method”.

2013

After the Wild West, the urban east and the arid Wilderness Trail, Mr Affleck returned to Texas with a more poetic exploration of the criminal south. Some critics found the influence of Mr Terrence Malick a little overwhelming, but the compositions, sunset hues and moral complexities director Mr David Lowery conjures are the ideal province for Mr Affleck to brood (Manchester By The Sea builds on this lyricism by contrasting the snow of the present with the fire of the past). Such was Mr Affleck’s chemistry with Ms Rooney Mara that the director has already collaborated with the pair again on A Ghost Story, which recently premiered at Sundance.

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