“Actually Frightening”: True Crime Fans Stunned By Physical Resemblance Between Scott Peterson And ‘Gone Girl’s Ben Affleck

Is art imitating life, or… ? In the wake of two documentaries about Scott Peterson hitting streaming services this month, true crime aficionados are picking up on the stark physical resemblance between the convicted murderer and actor Ben Affleck, who inhabited a similar role in the 2014 film Gone Girl.

Affleck plays Nick Dunne in the film adapted from Gillian Flynn‘s crime thriller novel, who become the main suspect in the missing person case of his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike).

As for Peterson, he was convicted of murdering his wife Laci, who went missing in 2002 and was pregnant at the time with their unborn son, Conner. Laci and Conner’s remains were found in San Francisco Bay in 2003.

American Murder: Laci Peterson was released on Netflix last Wednesday (Aug. 14), and the three-part docuseries has elicited reactions surrounding Peterson and Affleck’s resemblance.

“It’s actually frightening how much Scott Peterson and Ben Affleck look alike,” one X user wrote. “They popped off with the Gone Girl casting.”

Another noted on X that while watching the new doc, they recognized Peterson’s “weird smirk smile” and “immediately said to [their] husband “that reminds me of Ben Affleck in Gone Girl.”

One viewer deemed it “INSANE how much Ben Affleck’s character in Gone Girl was modeled off of Scott Peterson.”

However, as noted by The Daily Mail, Flynn told Entertainment Weekly in a 2012 interview that she “definitely didn’t want to do anything specific” when asked if she modeled the novel “after a particular real-life case.” While she claimed that “one could point to Scott and Lac[i] Peterson” and that “they were certainly a good-looking couple,” she argued that “they’re always good-looking couples,” as those are the people who “end up on TV.”

“You don’t normally see incredibly ugly people who’ve gone missing and it becomes a sensation,” Flynn continued. “It could be any number of those types of cases, but that was what kind of interested me: the selection and the packaging of a tragedy. In a way, I reverse-engineered some of it. What’s going to amp up the media’s interest in this, and what’s going to make it believable that the media’s going to descend on this?”

A Reddit forum debating whether or not Peterson and Affleck look alike is also picking up traffic, with some pointing out the “uncanny” similarity between Peterson’s interview with Diane Sawyer and Affleck’s Nick Dunne interview scene in the movie. Another Reddit user said that they were “glad” they were “not the only one” to notice the resemblance.

However, some thought differently.

“It’s not the Ben Affleck I ordered. Return to sender lol,” one quipped.

The teaser trailer for the other new Peterson docuseries, Peacock‘s Face to Face with Scott Peterson — which hit the streamer on Tuesday (Aug. 20) — features an interview with Peterson, the first to take place since 2003. Peterson aired his regret over cheating on his wife prior to her disappearance, claiming that he “feel[s] so much shame.”