REEL DEAL: Carrie Coon - Ben Afflecks Voice Of Reason In "GONE GIRL"

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike portray the role of their lives in the grittiest thriller of the year in "Gone Girl," based on the bestselling tome of Gillian Flynn brought to life onscreen by renowned filmmaker David Fincher.

Affleck and Pike play Nick and Amy Dunne respectively who personify the quintessential romantic match and modern married couple.  But on the day of their fifth year wedding anniversary, Amy curiously disappears. Her vanishing becomes a kind of hall of mirrors in which tantalizing and savage secrets lead to even more tantalizing and savage secrets.  The events that unfold are thick with shocks and complications, but the questions that remain are what cut, with razor-sharp precision, to the bone:  Who is Nick?  Who is Amy? Who are any of us in marriages -- and a society -- built on a precarious base of projected images and disguises?

Taking the alternately guarded and exposed role is Ben Affleck.   Says Fincher of casting him:  “Putting a cast together is like putting a basketball team together and Nick was the point guard.  He has to feed the narrative.  It’s a ‘he said, she said’ in the book; but it’s ‘he experiences, she experiences’ in the movie.  It’s more subjective.  You’re not gifted with all these inner monologues in the movie.  So you need an actor who is very deft to play this role.  It’s 3-D chess, not Chinese checkers."

REAL DEAL: Search For “GONE GIRL” Starts October 8

From the tour de force thriller that became a bestselling must-read comes David Fincher’s screen version of Gone Girl, a wild ride through our modern media culture and down into the deep, dark fault lines of an American marriage – in all its unreliable promises, inescapable deceits and pitch-black comedy. 

The couple at the center of the story – former New York writer Nick Dunne and his formerly “cool girl” wife Amy, now trying to make ends meet in the mid-recession Midwest – have all the sinuous outer contours of contemporary marital bliss.  But on the occasion of their 5th wedding anniversary, Amy goes missing -- and those contours crack into a maze of fissures.  Nick becomes the prime suspect, shrouded in a fog of suspicious behavior.  Amy becomes the vaunted object of a media frenzy as the search for her, dead or alive, plays out before the eyes of a world thirsting for revelations. 

REEL DEAL" Marriage Under Media Scrutiny In "GONE GIRL"

The bestselling page-turner “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn gets film treatment from director David Fincher, known for his thrilling works in acclaimed hits “Fight Club,” “Se7en,” “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” “Zodiac” and “The Social Network” where Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike star as the afflicted couple when the Mrs. disappears on the day of their fifth year wedding anniversary. 

One of the most anticipated movie of the season, “Gone Girl” is also written for the screen by the book’s author (Flynn) that explores a troubled marriage and how the media played a major part on Nick and Amy’s marriage.   Affleck plays Nick Dunne, a man who becomes the prime suspect in a murder when his wife Amy (Pike) is nowhere to be found on their fifth wedding anniversary.