Remembering the time Ben Affleck stopped production of Gone Girl over a Yankees hat

Never forget the time Ben Affleck stopped production of a movie because he didn’t want to wear a Yankees hat. 

Let’s cut right to the chase: Boston sports fandom hits entirely different than most other fandoms in the world. For better or worse, there’s a unique something about Boston fandom that is either adored (by Boston fans) or unspeakably loathed (everyone else).

There are a ton of ways to describe how hardcore insane Boston fandom is, but the easiest story to tell is the one where noted Boston sports fan Ben Affleck so staunchly refused to wear a Yankees hat in a movie that he shut down production.

For some reason, film director David Fincher was a thing on social media this week, and with the random blip on Twitter’s radar came the resurfacing of that absolutely legendary flex by Ben Affleck on the set of Gone Girl.

It’s not a new story, as Fincher told the tale on the director’s commentary track for the movie, but that doesn’t make it any less iconic. While filming a scene in a New York airport, Affleck’s character needs to disguise himself by buying a baseball cap from a store and wearing it. Fincher chose a Yankees as the hat that should be worn and Affleck was so opposed to the idea of wearing his rival’s logo that he shut down production for days until a compromise was made.

It’s one thing to not want to wear a baseball hat for real life reasons but it’s a totally insane thing to halt production of a major studio motion picture — for multiple days — over your fandom. Affleck and Fincher eventually stalemated and a Mets hat was worn on film, but this is truly a

For context, Fincher is a well-known perfectionist bordering on insanity. He famously broke Jake Gyllenhaal’s will to live during Zodiac by having him do over 100 takes of his character picking up a pen, and Mark Ruffalo has a great story about how Fincher did multiple takes of a hallway walk-and-talk so he could adjust where background characters were standing by mere millimeters. Fincher also had a stuntman thrown down a flight of concrete stairs over 10 times during a scene in Fight Club, only to use the first take in the finished film. Lest we forget, Fincher made his bones by taking on an entire movie studio to try and wrestle creative control away executives during the filming of franchise IP (Alien 3) as a first-time director.

That’s the guy Affleck decided to take on over wearing a Yankees hat.

Of course, Gone Girl is best viewed through the lens of being a pastiche of Affleck’s life as a celebrity. Fincher knew exactly what he was doing by asking Affleck to wear a Yankees hat and the legendary story that came out of it was likely as calculated as everything else Fincher does on the sets of his films.