‘The Accountant 2’ Is All About Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal’s Brotherly Love

Director Gavin O’Connor has been trying to make a sequel to The Accountant, the action thriller film starring Ben Affleck as a gifted autistic accountant who cooks the books for criminal organizations, since the first film hit theaters in 2016. “It was brutal,” he tells Vanity Fair. “It just felt like this flower that was ready to bloom, and then it would stop again and start again. It was so frustrating.”

The sequel was stuck in development for eight years as studios changed their strategies and leadership, and the industry turned away from making entertaining but smart mid-budget movies. Finally, The Accountant 2, which stars Affleck as Christian Wolff and Jon Bernthal as his highly lethal brother, Brax, will see the light of day when it has its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film and TV Festival of March 8, followed by a theatrical run on April 25 via Amazon MGM.

The sequel has many of the ingredients that made the first film memorable, including surprising twists and strong action sequences. But it also delves deeper into the main characters’ emotional needs and desires by showcasing the brothers’ relationship in a way the first film couldn’t. “I’m a believer in that multiple things can exist,” Affleck says. “You can do a movie for a big audience. And I think that’s really the same thing as a movie with characters that seem real, and that you connect to and care about.”

In The Accountant 2, Wolff is recruited to help Treasury Agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, also reprising her role from the original film) solve a case after someone close to them is murdered. To do so, he and Brax must work together despite their divergent personalities and years of estrangement. The brothers haven’t seen each other since the events that unfolded in the original film eight years earlier. “It was very important to me to make an exuberant, entertaining movie,” O’Connor says of the sequel, which was written by Bill Dubuque. “I wanted to make an emotional film and also not just an action movie, which I would find wildly boring and uninteresting. An action movie that dealt with human connection and love was something that I really wanted to explore.”

Bernthal looks back fondly on his experience on The Accountant, which filmed in 2015 in Atlanta. At the time, he hadn’t yet starred in the Marvel series The Punisher or critically acclaimed films like Wind River and Baby Driver, or won an Emmy for appearing on The Bear. He remembers a day on The Accountant where he was wearing a slick suit and carrying Brax’s gun and caught a glimpse of his reflection in a window. “I remember just being, like, ‘Holy shit, man, you’re really doing this,” he says.

Affleck was also on a rapid ascent around that time, with his directing career taking off after 2012’s Oscar-winning Argo and a series of canny acting choices that included prestige fare like 2014’s Gone Girl and caped crusading in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. When it was released, The Accountant was a modest hit (the $44 million film earned $155 million worldwide), but Affleck says it has become an audience favorite. “It was a movie that I found that I would hear about from people,” he says. “It was a movie that stuck around, that people would talk about and say, ‘Oh, hey, I like The Accountant.’ And there seemed to be a lot of goodwill towards it.”

So both actors were very game to come back for a sequel and were incentivized by the opportunity to work closer together this time . In the first film, the brothers’ traumatic upbringing is revealed in flashbacks—but the adult Christian and Brax don’t cross paths until the end of the film, when the audience discovers their familial relationship. In The Accountant 2, though, it’s at the core of the film. “I love Jon so much as an actor and as a guy,” Affleck says. “I have a real fondness that I thought would translate easily into this sort of brother relationship.”

The centrality of Brax and Christian’s relationship allowed Bernthal to peel back layers of his character beyond his flashy clothes and flashier personality. After all, there’s no one who understands you more—and is quicker to call you out—than your own family. “It was really fun to kind of take a deeper dive in this one,” he says, “But also because we get to spend so much more time with them, especially together, we see the things that are kind of a façade and a cover and get to the truth of who they actually are.”

Essentially, both men are looking for connection. There’s a theme of loneliness that runs through the story, from Christian’s often fumbled efforts to meet women to Brax’s wounded wondering why his brother hasn’t wanted to keep in touch. “This is a guy who wants to have a relationship. He wants to have friends,” Affleck says of Christian. “He’s good at some things and good at others. And I thought that the kind of vulnerability and honesty of that was kind of an interesting risk to take.”

Beyond the banter between brothers, the two leads also deliver on some ambitious action sequences. Christian is not only a math savant: Both brothers were trained in combat at a young age, making for an interesting juxtaposition. The sequel also attempts to shine a light on human trafficking, which O’Connor says was one of his first goals. “It was a tall tonal order trying to juggle all those balls,” O’Connor says. “And I honestly didn’t know if I pulled it off when I was shooting it. But once I started to build the movie in post [production], I felt like I did.”

Affleck and Bernthal both acknowledge they’ve changed a great deal as actors since filming the original movie. O’Connor sees that as well. “I feel like Jon has hit a level as an actor where he doesn’t second guess himself as much as he did on the first,” O’Connor says. “He’s just much more confident.”

Affleck says it wasn’t difficult to step back into the role of Christian, and that he felt more connected to the role this time. “I felt even more prepared and educated, and I had a deeper affinity for the character,” he says. O’Connor adds that Christian is the soul of the film, a project that only works because of Affleck’s performance: “He put the clothes back on and he just started becoming the strange laboratory of Chris’s brain, and he just started expressing Chris again in a very honest, authentic, very real way.”

For O’Connor, returning to The Accountant was an emotional journey. After helming the original film, he went on to make 2020’s The Way Back (also starring Affleck)—but that experience left him bruised after its release got waylaid by the pandemic. “The movie came out on a Friday, and the theaters closed on a Monday. It was heartbreaking,” he says. O’Connor decided to take a break from filmmaking, left Los Angeles, and spent some time with his family. The Accountant 2 got him back in the game. “It was really invigorating,” he says. “And so, I do feel like I’ve hit another level as a storyteller.”

O’Connor says he always envisioned Christian Wolff’s story as a trilogy, and that he’s been recently talking to Affleck—whose company, Artists Equity, also backed the sequel—about where the story could go next. “I have a lot of thoughts about what to do with the third. I’ve been thinking about it for a lot of years,” he says.

Affleck, though, is focused on getting The Accountant 2 in front of audiences and proving that it was worth the wait. “I’m keenly aware of the fact that you kind of have to earn another movie,” he says. “The worst pitfall is to store a bunch of your good ideas for the next installment. If you don’t create an interest demand the first time out there, you’re just going to be playing that to an empty house.”