Casey Affleck is sharing the story of how he rescued Seth Meyers‘ family from a stranded boat.
During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers on Thursday, August 15, Affleck, 49, recalled the events leading up to saving the SNL alum’s family on not one, but two boats. The Instigators star shared that he was visiting his mom on Cape Cod when he met up with a friend to go boating and spend the day on the water.
“So I go out on this very small, teeny little boat and we’re zipping out, launching into the water, and we see this family – an older gentleman, this lovely woman and a little baby – and they’re sort of waving, but it became clear they’re waving for help,” he began. “So we went over to this family and they said, ‘Our boat’s dead. We’re adrift.’ So we thought, ‘Oh god, we gotta help them out.’”
After heading back to shore to retrieve a battery so they could jump the stranded boat, ultimately “saving their lives,” as Affleck joked, he and his pal hopped on jet skis and continued their water activities.
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“We’re puttering about and then I see another boat, and there you are, standing at the bow of this little boat – shirt off, tan, svelte. Your chest was up, it was like Leo on the Titanic,” Affleck continued. “I don’t know what you were doing out there, but you looked great. You were like a nautical leader of men.”
Once Affleck returned to shore, he said someone who he was with got a phone call about Meyers’ boat.
“They say, ‘That was Seth on his boat. He’s stranded.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And they said, ‘He’s run out of gas and can’t get back in,’” he explained. “So they went out and got you – I was on the way to somewhere else – to save you. And then they told me that the first boat of people… that was your family.”
“That was my father-in-law and sister-in-law,” Meyers, 50, responded before joking, “I don’t know who the baby was. That baby’s not my business.”
After helping save the Meyers family on two separate occasions that day, the Academy Award winner jokingly concluded, “I thought, ‘That family maybe shouldn’t be out on the water.’”
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Earlier this week, Affleck exclusively chatted with Us Weekly about working with longtime family friend Matt Damon on their Apple+ movie, The Instigators. The duo have been close pals for decades, costarring in projects like Good Will Hunting, Interstellar, Oppenheimer and the Ocean’s trilogy. Damon, 53, is also famously close with Casey’s older brother, Ben Affleck.
“We’ve known each other for a really long time,” Casey explained, noting that the pair have experienced “just about every” up and down friendship can bring. “The fights, the best times, marriages and divorces and kids being born. Just all of it.”
He added, “He’s actually a very, very smart actor, and he approaches things intellectually. He’s a very cerebral guy. That’s not the way that I tend to approach a scene or character or moment, so it was nice to be reminded of how he works. He’s had all his own experiences, and I’ve had all my own different experiences. And so even though we know each other so well, when you get to work together every day again, I got to see, like, ‘Oh, look, he’s learned a few new things!’”
