![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/d9596ee2dead88a1d6e0136be515f94bfb-rip-ben.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Claire Folger\/Netflix\n <\/p>\n
What makes Ben Affleck really, genuinely happy? Letting his Masshole accent flow<\/a>, whether he\u2019s in a Dunkin\u2019<\/a> or not. For a while, marrying women named Jennifer; for not enough time, tearing into Bill Maher for his Islamophobia<\/a>. And now, in The Rip: getting to speak Spanish. So much Spanish! If you told me that Affleck signed on to produce and star in this project just to remind us that actually, he\u2019s bilingual, I\u2019d believe you. Rolling his R\u2019s, gendering his nouns, proving to us he knows what a tilde does \u2026 congratulations to him. Speaking Spanish in The Rip is the happiest Affleck has looked in months.<\/p>\n Hunky American actors love to be like, \u201cNot only am I conventionally attractive, but also I can speak another language,\u201d and often, that language is French. Bradley Cooper<\/a>, Holt McCallany<\/a>, and, of course, Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet<\/a> have all done interviews in French during various press tours, a subtle flex that they\u2019re simply not like all those other white guys. To set oneself apart in the hypercompetitive world of Hollywood, and especially as streamers like Netflix are exporting their projects to worldwide audiences, speaking something other than English is undoubtedly an asset. (My favorite recent reveal: Tim Baltz\u2019s<\/a> French fluency in I Love LA<\/a>.) But Affleck in particular has never really seemed like he\u2019s speaking Spanish to expand his portfolio. He\u2019s already directed a Best Picture film, he\u2019s already been Batman, he\u2019s already become an array of Internet memes and come out the other side. There are few things left for Affleck to do in this industry. So why not show off the language he learned when he was 13<\/a>, living in Mexico and doing a children\u2019s TV show? (Another flex: how long Affleck\u2019s been acting.) Why not emphasize his enduring interest in the language? The Rip is slightly tedious and challengingly paced, but speaking Spanish in it is surely a little treat for Affleck as well as a jolt of excitement for us.<\/p>\n In Joe Carnahan\u2019s action film, Affleck and Matt Damon play Detective Sergeant J.D. Byrne and Lieutenant Dane Dumars, respectively, Miami narcotics officers who end up in a cartel stash house with $20 million hidden in the walls. In Affleck\u2019s first appearance onscreen, he\u2019s wearing a track jacket, a gold chain, and two shoulder holsters for his guns, and he\u2019s smoking a cigarette indoors. He presents as an entitled cop scumbag \u2014 but he\u2019s actually furious about the assassination of his boss and lover, Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) and doesn\u2019t understand why the FBI and DEA aren\u2019t doing more to find out who killed her. He\u2019s not who you expect him to be, and that\u2019s deepened barely ten or so minutes into the film, when he casually starts speaking Spanish to his Latino colleagues.<\/p>\n In-universe, this is probably a requirement of J.D.\u2019s job, since he\u2019s investigating Mexican and Colombian cartels and probably communicating often with characters from those and other South and Latin American countries. The Rip does a lot of character work, though, with how easily J.D. slips in and out of the language, a fluidity that Affleck totally sells. There\u2019s a suggestion that unlike Dane, J.D. might be the cop who actually meets his colleagues and the community where they are. He calms the short-tempered Detective Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who complains about the job\u2019s poor pay, by speaking to her in Spanish. (This movie sticks with the pervasive propaganda that cops are now underfunded. The Miami-Dade police got tens of millions more dollars in their budget last year<\/a>, and nationwide for the past few years funding<\/a> has<\/a> increased<\/a>.) When J.D. encounters a cartel lookout in the neighborhood, he figures out what the guy is up to by having a rapid discussion with him in Spanish and reporting it back to Dane. And there\u2019s a frankly euphoric scene in which J.D. and Dane gab with a cartel boss over video chat, the two of them squeezed together in the vertical frame while the older criminal, in a creamy cable-knit sweater and precisely combed hair, politely tells them they can have the money they found if they want it. When J.D. asks whether the cartel killed Velez, of course he asks it in Spanish because he doesn\u2019t want the information to get lost in translation.<\/p>\n Is Affleck\u2019s pronunciation good? I will leave that question to a fluent speaker. But there\u2019s a sincerity to Affleck when he speaks Spanish as J.D., and an enthusiasm when he says lines even as simple as, \u201cOkay, claro!\u201d The man is overjoyed to be using another skill and to be giving it his best effort. It\u2019s a little try-hard how often Carnahan\u2019s script has J.D. call someone he doesn\u2019t like a \u201ccunt,\u201d like The Rip is trying to shock us into attention in the first few minutes. But honestly? If they had scripted Affleck saying \u201cco\u00f1o\u201d instead, that would have ripped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Claire Folger\/Netflix What makes Ben Affleck really, genuinely happy? Letting his Masshole accent flow, whether he\u2019s in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":536066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[54426,185,171,49069,237085,53,4659,117835,67,132,68,1147,1146],"class_list":{"0":"post-536065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ben-affleck","9":"tag-celebrities","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-matt-damon","12":"tag-mi-gente-latino","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-netflix","15":"tag-the-rip","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-vulture-homepage-lede","20":"tag-vulture-section-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115942199918918965","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}