Being Ben Affleck
Kodish chose law school over a chance to stand in for Affleck on the set of Forces of Nature
Published in 2006 Georgia Super Lawyers magazine
By Rebecca Boever on February 16, 2006
Thad Kodish had completed his first year at Emory Law School and was interning at Needle & Rosenberg when he received an offer he couldn’t refuse — the chance to work as an extra on the set of a Ben Affleck movie.
“It all started off very benignly,” Kodish says about the call he got from a family friend to work on locally filmed Forces of Nature. But what started out to be a short-term gig nearly turned into three months when he was asked to stay and serve as the star’s stand-in. “I guess they thought I looked enough like him to do the job,” he says.
Kodish had already been absent from his internship for a week and was scheduled to start his second year of law school the following week. “All that made me make this horrible decision, which was to say no,” Kodish says.
Days later on the golf course Kodish told his predicament to Sumner Rosenberg, who agreed that he had made a bad decision. “He told me to call them back,” Kodish remembers. “He told me I had to do it.” Rosenberg told Kodish that after three months on the set he could come back and finish the year at the firm and then continue with his second year of law school. “So I called them up and it was already filled,” Kodish says. “That was the end of it.”
Or so he thought. Last February he was eating sushi in Los Angeles when he ran into Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Kodish reintroduced himself to Affleck and made small talk with the couple. Back at the table, Kodish had a camera but decided not to take a picture of the couple. Had he known then what he knows now, the picture could have documented the last minutes of the stars’ relationship. “I would have captioned it ‘The Last Supper,’” Kodish says.
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