Ben Affleck says 'Armageddon' director forced him to 'be sexy' onscreen: 'They made me fix my teeth'

• Affleck recalled to Matt Damon for Entertainment Weekly how he became a heartthrob for "Armageddon."
• "They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that?" he said.

A year after scoring his first Oscar win for co-screenwriting "Good Will Hunting" with his childhood pal Matt Damon, Ben Affleck was suddenly thrust into the 1998 Michael Bay blockbuster "Armageddon" starring opposite Bruce Willis in which the pair lead a group of deep-core drillers into space to destroy an oncoming asteroid.

In a recent chat with Damon for Entertainment Weekly, Affleck, who up to that point had only starred in independent films, recalled what he went through to be the movie's sexy stud.

"They made me fix my teeth and work out and be sexy. Be sexy, how do I do that?" Affleck said to Damon.

"'Go to the gym!' Running in the gym and putting oil on my body and stuff," he continued. "It just turned out to be a long-form version of one of those male topless calendars, in a garage, carrying a tire, kind of greased up."

Affleck recalled Bay having "a vision of a glistening male torso in the oil, and he was like, 'That's going to go in the trailer and sell tickets!'"

Affleck — whose current movie "The Tender Bar," is available on Amazon — also revealed that the Bay movie is the one he gets teased the most about from his kids.

"It's funny because that's the one movie of mine that my kids have watched and they'll kind of all admit to liking, even though they relentlessly mock it and me," he told Damon. "'What are you, driving a tank on the moon?' But they had fun."