Dating Takes On Added Complications For Film Stars

Dating is probably the devil’s idea of a civilized form of torture. Everybody endures it, nobody likes it, and nobody does anything about it.

But suppose you’re a movie actor or actress, someone who already has fans drooling over you, who prompts uncounted hits on the Internet and who can’t buy a roll of toilet paper without someone noticing?

That could render the dating game practically inoperable. Ben Affleck, the studly star of “Going All the Way” (opening Friday) and “Dazed and Confused,” says the dash of notoriety makes a touchy ritual even more hazardous.

“There was a time when I wondered why am I getting more attention from women than I had before? And I honestly said, ‘I don’t know what it is. Things are really working out for me now.”’

Then his buddies (including actor Matt Damon) jerked him back to reality.

“They said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘It might have something to do with the fact that you’re (in the movies).’ I thought I was really in a groove, thought I was having a lucky streak. I was sort of disillusioned. ‘What do you mean? It’s not me? It’s not my charming self?”’

To register in the public eye definitely makes it more difficult, says the 25-year-old.

“I suppose it would make it easier to have fleeting superficial relationships if that’s what you’re interested in, but it doesn’t make it easier to trust people, and it doesn’t make an already difficult game any easier,” Affleck says.

“It’s a tricky thing to navigate. Like in ‘Going All the Way,’ I think it’s kind of a time-worn tradition that you have a god-awful time trying to figure out what this thing is between men and women and how to deal with it. It’s just not easy.”

The situation remains as confusing for women.

Janeane Garofalo, the acerbic wit from “Saturday Night Live” who’s starring in “The Matchmaker” (opening Friday), contends she has studiously avoided dating.

“The closest I’ve ever come is where someone says, ‘Oh, meet me here for drinks,”’ she says. “I never had anyone pick me up at my house.”

She says she’s wise to the guys who are interested just because she’s in the limelight.

“I can tell if guys are flirting with me in a bar because I’ve spent the majority of my life never turning a head in a bar or at a party,” she says. “Nobody ever went out of their way to talk to me ever before.

“Now if they do, there’s got to be a reason. It’s not like I walk into a room, and every head’s going to turn.

“So it’s got to be the guys who come up, ‘Hi, what’s your name?’ Because that’s never happened prior. They pretend they don’t know who I am.

“They say, ‘What’s your name?’ And I’ll say, ‘Pam.’ And I can tell in their eyes they’re lying.”

Mega-star Michael Douglas (“The Game”) finds himself free again after a 20-year marriage. He thinks it’s old news when women are attracted to him because of his status.

“It’s like full circle,” he says. “I used to ask myself, as a teenager, if a girl liked me because of who I was or because my dad (Kirk Douglas) was a movie star. I laugh at it now. Now I don’t care.

“I trust my instincts, and I’ll know soon enough one way or other. I don’t care. If that’s important to them, I’ll find out about it soon enough.”

Though Douglas has played sexually magnetic characters in such films as “Fatal Attraction” and “Disclosure,” that’s only in the movies, he says.

“I never perceived myself as being a swinger, an active dater,” he says. “I’ve never been real good at small talk or dealing with multiple relationships or talking to different people - that’s going to be a little passe - but I think it’ll be exciting.”

Joan Rivers found herself negotiating the dating game after her husband’s death.

“At first I would go out and cry in the middle of an evening. Now it’s just very embarrassing,” Rivers says.

“I’m just too old to be making conversation: ‘Where did you go to college?’ The man is 108 years old.

“I just find the whole thing very embarrassing and silly, that you’re checking your pocketbook for breath mints.”

Rachel Weisz, the beauteous star of the forthcoming “Swept from the Sea” and co-star with Affleck in “Going All the Way,” says it’s very uncomfortable to be placed on a pedestal by some adoring suitor.

“That doesn’t happen to me,” she says. “And it’s very easy to unpedestal yourself.

“In real life nothing could be worse. You’re stuck on a little surface area, and it’s boring.”