Maddy Wary seems like your average college student, aside from having her own IMDb page and having acted alongside Ben Affleck.
A first-year at UR, Wary recently starred in Netflix film “Triple Frontier” withAffleck, Pedro Pascal, and Oscar Isaac. The movie was directed by the Oscar-nominated J.C. Chandor and was filmed mainly in Hawaii, where Wary lives.
“Triple Frontier” is an action thriller that follows a group of former Special Operations agents as they plan a heist on a Colombian drug lord. Affleck plays Tom “Redfly” Davis, one of the agents, and Wary plays his daughter, Tess Davis.
Wary described her character to the Campus Times as “an average teenager,” except that she’s “really sneaky […] she always acts like she’s not caring [about adult matters] like a cool 15-year-old, but then you also know that she knows everything that is going on with her parents.”
Tess recognizes the struggles of Affleck’s character as he tries to adjust from the life of a secret agent to a more normal one. Wary said viewed her on-screen dad as a negligent but generally good dad.
She first auditioned in her junior year of high school, not expecting to get the part at all, especially after the movie ran into financial problems. But a year later, she received a call asking her for a second audition and jumped at the opportunity, even though she was hospitalized. Wary’s sickness was possibly a blessing in disguise — she described being so sick that she didn’t feel nervous.
For Wary, the role was a natural one, and she likes to imagine Tess as “being [as] close to [her]self as possible.”
But not everything was so easy for the new actress. Wary detailed her struggles during a particular scene, where she says “I miss you” to Affleck’s character. “I kept on getting nervous about that because I could so easily make that so cringey,” she said. “I was frustrated because I could not get myself into the complexity that Tess would feel at that time.”
Many of her scenes take place in the backseat of a car with headphones on, and to calm her nerves and further get into the teenage perspective, Wary would sometimes listen to music over the headphones.
The glamor of the film was also unexpected, especially the red carpet premiere and private screening. Wary wasn’t aware that there was a red carpet until she got there, so she walked it in a $17 romper she bought from Macy’s the day before.
Now that the Hollywood glam has faded into the past, Wary has adjusted to life at UR, where she plans to double major in brain and cognitive sciences and mathematics. Wary says that acting is “not [her] focus right now” and plans to “keep acting stuff separate from school.” At UR, she is involved in the tennis program and works at the Barnes and Noble Cafe in College Town. She plans to start a club next year to bring the Hawaiian “island vibe” to the Rochester winter.
Even though she doesn’t plan on actively pursuing her acting career right now, the opportunity was one she won’t forget anytime soon. It was a “cool experience to learn from [Affleck] of how […] focused he is in his character,” Wary said. “You could tell he was a professional and knew what he was doing.”
