Growing up on Long Island in the 1980s, Chris Messina wasn’t the world’s biggest sports fan. “I was the theater kid, so I was running away from getting beaten up by the football player,” he says with a laugh. But even he couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Michael Jordan. “I just remember him literally flying through the air,” Messina says. “I was into dancing—my mom was a dance teacher—so the idea that someone could jump like that through the air was remarkable.”
It’s a bit ironic, then, that Messina is now one of the stars in a movie about the creation of the Jordan mythos that features none of what drew so many people to him in the first place. Air, which opens April 5, has no flying, no dunking, no tongue-wagging. Save for a few brief clips of North Carolina game footage, Jordan’s face is never seen. All viewers get is the back of his head, and his voice is heard ever so briefly on the phone. He’s like George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld—only if Seinfeld was a show entirely about the Yankees.
Director Ben Affleck considered deepfaking a young Jordan into the movie, but he wasn’t sure it would look authentic. And he also came to realize that Jordan’s story could be told better with a less-is-more approach. “You hear the famous story about the special-effects shark not working [and limiting its appearances], and it ends up making Jaws more effective,” Affleck says. “It means that [Jordan] is even more elusive, mysterious and magical. You never see him, but he’s everywhere.”
With virtually no action, the movie relies on drama, specifically whether Nike—then a plucky company that was a distant third in the nascent sneaker wars behind Converse and Adidas—could save its basketball division. (As Nike executive Howard White, played brilliantly by Chris Tucker, puts it, “Nike is a jogging company, and Black people don’t jog.”)
Portrayed by Matt Damon, Sonny Vaccaro is given $250,000 to spend on three players in the 1984 NBA draft. (“What about this fella Vern Fleming?” someone suggests.) Vaccaro gets it into his head that the way forward is to go all in on one player, and he lands on Jordan, who had knocked down the game-winning shot against Georgetown in the ’82 national title game.
And in a nutshell, that’s the movie: Vaccaro trying to convince his bosses (Affleck plays Phil Knight) to go along with the plan, then selling it to Jordan’s camp—most notably his agent, David Falk (Messina), and his mom, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan requested play the role).
Courtesy Amazon Studios
If you require a spoiler alert at this point, you’re probably reading the wrong website. Like Argo, the Affleck-directed story of six American hostages escaping Iran in 1979 that won the Best Picture Oscar in 2013, Air tells a story whose ending is known by the audience well before they buy their tickets. “When the plane takes off [at the end of] Argo, you know what happens, but you’re still going, Oh my God, I hope they get out!” says Messina, who costarred in that film as well. “I feel like Air has that same quality. It’s an extreme quality of Ben’s. He knows how to build tension.”
Indeed he does. And the fact that he proves it in a movie that is essentially a talk-fest—“It almost reads like a play,” says Messina—speaks volumes to Affleck’s skill as a director. Two of the most pivotal scenes in the film are phone calls: one between Vaccaro and Falk, the other between Vaccaro and Deloris. “Phone scenes are killers, especially if an actor is just reading lines to a script supervisor or to nobody,” says Affleck.
So he came up with a novel plan. Instead of asking his actors to pull a Bob Newhart and re-create half a conversation, he put them in separate sets and had them talk in real time. “There were three cameras on Matt and three on me, and we were actually talking to each other on the phone,” says Messina. “So if Matt improvised something or if I did, it was caught live. It was the best part of the movie for me, because I was actually in those scenes with Matt. When I got the part I was thrilled, but I was like, ‘Oh wow, these are phone calls, and I want to act with Matt. I want that experience.’ And I got it.”
Messina’s portrayal of Falk is significant not only for its quality, but also for what it says about the importance Affleck places on verisimilitude. As Knight, Affleck wears a floppy wig and short shorts. Damon’s prosthetic paunch—combined with his performance in The Informant in 2009—cements his status as a first-ballot Dad Bod Hall of Famer. But the majestically coiffed Messina is notably different from Falk, whose autobiography is titled The Bald Truth. It was decided that having Messina keep his lovely head of hair made the character slicker—more agent-like.
As terrific as Messina and Damon are, and as electric as Damon is opposite Davis, the most compelling relationship in the movie is that of Vaccaro and Knight. As inextricably linked as the two are, Damon and Affleck haven’t spent a ton of time on-screen together recently. But you’d never guess that from the ease with which the two play off each other. And Affleck was careful not to overthink their scenes. “I think the best stuff is the stuff that feels the easiest,” he says. “It reminded me of Good Will Hunting—the joy, the opportunity to actually get to do the thing you wanna do with your best friend. He’s still my best friend after all these years.”
Working together again—and seeing the sublime end result—left Affleck feeling a bit introspective about his working relationship with Damon. “Why haven’t we been doing this for 20 years?” he says. “I think we kind of made a mistake and thought, Oh, people associate us with one another too much . . . and then we ended up going our own ways. And I remember sitting there with him, saying, ‘I wish we hadn’t.’ ”
