Casey Affleck shares a lesson from his career: 'Listen to yourself'

— -- Oscar nominee Casey Affleck may be at the top of his game now, but it hasn’t always been easy for him.

The Oscar nominee said things began to change in his career when he made the conscious decision to trust his own instincts. A turning point came when Affleck first auditioned for a role in the movie “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

“I auditioned for that movie so many times I can’t tell you. Every single time after every audition they told me, ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get it,’” Affleck said in an interview on ABC News’ “Popcorn with Peter Travers.” “The director would say it. And my agents would say, ‘Give it up.’ And I would call and say I’d like to audition again.

But despite the many rejections, Affleck kept pushing.

“They said, ‘You have to just let this go.’ But I knew that I knew that part. I’d read the book. I read the scripts. I had researched it all and I knew that I could play it. And I kept going. And then finally they wouldn’t let me audition anymore so I just put myself on tape. And I wrote the director a letter and I said, ‘Listen, this is what I would do with this part.’ And I gave it to him and finally he cast me.”

Affleck went on to earn an Oscar nomination for that role. And he shared an important lesson he learned from the experience.

“You can’t listen so much to other people telling you what you should do can do and what you can’t do,” Affleck, 41, told Peter Travers. “You kind of have to listen to yourself and know that you’re going to have to live with that career that you build. No one else is. Everyone else is going to walk away and you’re going to be left with, ‘I wish I had done this.’ And so you’ve just kind of got to do it.”

Now Affleck is leading the pack with an Oscar nomination for his most recent performance in the tearjerker drama “Manchester by the Sea.”

“I play a character. My brother passed away. And I have to return to my hometown to take care of his son, my nephew,” Affleck explained. “And as we discover, as the movie unfolds, there are some pretty big reasons why I do not want to be in that small town. I do not want to be responsible for this young man. At first it’s a little bit of a mystery, then as we learn more about Lee and his past, we come to understand more of why he is the way he is.”

Affleck said he approached the role with a specific image in his head that helped him to develop the character.

“I sort of thought of him as a balloon that had been filled with too much water. And sort of had to go very carefully and slowly so that he didn’t burst and had to keep anyone away from touching him so that he didn’t pop.”

“Manchester by the Sea” is in theaters everywhere.

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