FILM · 2016
The Accountant
35 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (35)
- #001
Alison Wright, who plays the adult Justine, also provides the computer voice with a British accent coming from the computer Justine uses. Although her work is more extensive than her time on screen, her voice-acting talent goes uncredited. Alison Wright was born in England.
- #002
Anna Kendrick based her character on her own mother, a real accountant who reviewed the script and explained math to her daughter.
- #003
Agent Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) tells Agent King (J. K. Simmons) that Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) gave $1,000,100 to the Harbor Neuroscience Institute. 1000100 equals sixty-eight in binary. Later in the film, the Institute's director says that one of sixty-eight children was diagnosed with autism.
- #004
In the hotel room, Dana (Anna Kendrick) explains that she taught herself to play blackjack and to count cards to determine the odds of winning a hand, in order to earn the money needed to buy her Vera Wang dress. In real life, Ben Affleck is known to be such a skilled poker and blackjack card player that he has been banned from many casinos — not for cheating, but because of his well-known card-counting habit. It is legal but against casino rules.
- #005
To avoid delays during reshoots, Ben Affleck's handwriting was digitized into a computer font and added in post-production for the window-writing scenes.
- #006
Ben Affleck stated that this is one of the top five personal favorite performances of his career. That list also includes Batman in the DC Extended Universe, Holden McNeil in Chasing Amy (1997), Tony Mendez in Argo (2012) and Chucky in Good Will Hunting (1997).
- #007
Although it may seem odd for a strongbox full of gold and other valuables to contain a copy of "Action Comics #1" (1938), that issue is worth more than $4 million in mint condition.
- #008
In his trailer at the storage unit, Christian has several copies of Action Comics #1, Superman's first appearance. He also has All American Comics #16 (possibly more than one), the first appearance of Green Lantern. In front of him are several rare and valuable baseball cards. The orange card on the left is the 1910 Honus Wagner tobacco card, one of the rarest and most valuable baseball cards ever produced. Only fifty to one hundred cards from that print run are estimated to exist. All of these collections are extremely valuable.
- #009
The Ravenite social club was the real-life former headquarters of Gambino crime boss John Gotti.
- #010
The martial art mostly shown is a variety of Indonesian Pencak Silat, also seen in The Raid: Redemption (2011).
- #011
The fictional Harbour Institute is located in Hanover, New Hampshire, the real-life home of Dartmouth College's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, one of the leading institutes for research into the brain and neural activity.
- #012
The film's screenplay appeared on the 2011 Black List, a list of the year's most liked unproduced screenplays.
- #013
In keeping with the "number 3" theme seen throughout the film, Christian Wolff uses the Mozambique Drill (two shots to the chest, one to the head) on several enemies. The drill is also called the Body Armor drill. Because many criminals now wear bulletproof vests, the head shot comes if the two body shots have no effect. The term Mozambique was probably first coined by Jeff Cooper.
- #014
Several times you hear Justine say "heavy sigh" out loud. At the end of the film, Justine is seen using a computer to communicate. Apparently the text-to-speech software she uses has no sound for *heavy sigh*, so every time she uses the phrase, the software pronounces it as written.
- #015
Chris tells Dana that his father was in the Army and worked in "Psy Ops," the abbreviation for the Army's "Psychological Operations Warfare Corps." He is later seen at his mother's funeral in the film. His father's Army uniform bears a Colonel's insignia, while Chris wears the rank of First Lieutenant on his uniform. Because of his military Psy Ops background, the father's brutal methods for preparing his sons to survive in a cold world are given justification.
- #016
Inside the cupboard door of Christian's trailer is a black-and-white collection of six "smiley face" photographs showing different emotions. It is the same picture that hangs at the Harbor Neuroscience Institute when his parents speak with the neurologist. Three of them match the faces he draws on the melons he uses for target practice.
- #017
"ZZZ Accounting" is a reference to ZZZ Carpet Cleaning, the company founded by Barry Minkow that went public in the 1980s and later collapsed due to fraudulent accounting. ZZZ Best's fraud was contemporaneous with the fraud of Crazy Eddie, another 1980s accounting scam mentioned in the film.
- #018
The Luke Skywalker lightsaber seen in Christian Wolff's Airstream Caravan is actually an unofficial replica of the "Graflex-Flash" lightsaber produced by Parks Sabres. It is assembled in roughly the configuration of the "Ranch Saber," the only surviving on-screen example of Luke Skywalker's lightsaber from the filming of Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980). It is kept in the Skywalker Ranch archives. The stand used to hold the saber is taken from an officially licensed "Master Replicas" on-screen lightsaber.
- #019
Agent Medina appears to associate the unidentified assassin's behavior with behaviors found in people with autism. Well-known people with autism include musician David Byrne of Talking Heads, children's author Lewis Carroll and actress Daryl Hannah. Familiar names among people with autism include author Hans Christian Andersen, director Tim Burton and actor Sir Anthony Hopkins.
- #020
Although The Accountant was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, it is set in Plainfield, Illinois, with scenes also taking place in downtown Chicago, Illinois. The high school Dana mentions, Naperville North, is a real school that Bob Odenkirk graduated from. Its math team won sixteen state championships.
- #021
In the written note to the right of Justine's computer, it says that at 4:02 she is to "Call C. W.," meaning Christian Wolff.
- #022
Dana and Christian discuss the use of the number "three" as the second digit in fake records. While eating breakfast, Christian makes three pancakes, three slices of bacon and three fried eggs. When he does target practice, he shoots three melons.
- #023
In a 2016 interview with Screen Rant, Gavin O'Connor discussed his experience working with Ben Affleck, himself a director, on the film: "In our first conversation, when we decided to make this film together, we were both testing each other. As for Ben, you know, he's worked with a lot of people; so he wanted to make sure that the story I wanted to tell, the tone of the film, the story I wanted to tell, matched his. We worked on the script a bit to ground it in reality and dramatize this character, and we talked about how we approached this character and how he has these skills. And I think we realized we were creatively compatible, and I think we have a similar aesthetic, a similar syntax in the way we talk about the film. There's a lot of work that has to be done to get there." Another issue was the action in the film. When you're Batman, you have to wear a mask, so I'm sure there's a stunt double who does most of that work — we don't have a stunt double, so [Affleck] would have to do a lot of work and training to do all the fight scenes. He committed himself 100% to it and did it all, working for months. And the last question I asked Ben was: 'Look, I'm a big fan of your work, but I have to ask this question so we don't run into a problem later: We can't have two directors on this film.' And he made it clear that this would never be a problem and never was. He… I think as a director Ben understands what that's like. There are hundreds of moving parts, balls in the air, and I think he liked being able to go to his trailer when there was a problem and not have to deal with it. And as a director he really knows… he shows up, he's prepared, he takes everything on. He beautifies everything. He's thoughtful and respectful and just does his job. He's committed."
- #024
The Jackson Pollock painting "Free Form," which appears in multiple scenes, looks much larger than the original canvas, which is listed in the MoMA collection as 19 1/4" x 14" (48.9 cm x 35.5 cm), even if it is not twice as large.
- #025
Among the four baseball cards Christian owns are the famous T206 Honus Wagner, the 1911 T205 Ryan Holblitzell, the 1915 Cracker Jack Christy Mathewson and the 1921 E121 American Caramel Babe Ruth holding a carrier pigeon.
- #026
Christian completes a jigsaw puzzle showing Muhammad Ali hovering over his defeated opponent Sonny Liston during the first-round knockout of their 1965 fight. The same puzzle is also framed in Justine's room.
- #027
The patch worn by the Colonel and Wolff most likely belongs to the 193rd Infantry Brigade, as another contributor also noted. However, the 193rd Infantry Brigade was deactivated in 2003 (the year Raymond King assigns as the year of the funeral incident). Second, the 193rd Infantry Brigade has a red sword, not the blue sword seen in the film. These two facts seem to point to the two men's "non-existence"; as King says, their files have been largely redacted and their names are not legitimate (and are covers). The patch the men wear resembles PSYOP patches in some respects, but most likely their patches offer no clue to their identity within the army either — just as their names do not help identify them.
- #028
The film was initially envisioned with Mel Gibson in the lead role and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen directing. There are also reports that Mel Gibson was considered to direct with Will Smith in the lead role.
- #029
At 1:04, Marybeth Medina searches the FBI Mugshot Database and investigates Suspected Gambino Family Associates in order to identify The Accountant. The mugshots appear to be real photos from the FBI's Most Wanted. The man identified as 'David Acciai' is actually Daniel Andreas San Diego, a suspected terrorist and animal rights activist on the FBI's 'most wanted terrorist' list. The real San Diego was sought for nearly twenty years for his alleged involvement in the 2003 bombings of two office buildings in San Francisco. San Diego was arrested in November 2024 in Maenan, between Conwy and Betws-y-Coed in rural Wales, after the UK National Crime Agency and North Wales police acted at the FBI's request. At the time of his arrest, he was the longest-running animal rights fugitive on the run.
- #030
The puzzle featured prominently in the film and its marketing is a clear reference to the puzzle piece symbol of autism, which has been used for years. Coincidentally, though not because of this film, that symbol was falling out of favor among neurodiversity and autism activists around the time this film was released. Its intended meaning — that people on the spectrum have different experiences — was often misunderstood by people who felt it trivialized autism as a puzzle to be solved.
- #031
While Dana (played by Anna Kendrick) looks at the items in Christian's (played by Ben Affleck) trailer, a brief shot shows a drawer full of plastic-wrapped cards. One of them is a Honus Wagner baseball card, the rarest and most expensive baseball card in the world. Fewer than 100 of them exist worldwide, and the last one sold at auction for over $7 million.
- #032
The closed captions on the DVD release spoil the plot twist that Wolff is the brother, because the subtitles name his character as Brax when the brothers are learning martial arts and also when he speaks as an adult. Most subtitles are more sensitive to this kind of plot point and would refer to him only as "man" when showing him as an adult. This is especially ironic given that the film tries to effectively counter disability issues with a neurodivergent hero.
- #033
The film is set in Plainfield, Illinois and Chicago, and mentions other Illinois cities such as Aurora, Joliet, Kankakee and Naperville. It was actually filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, because of superior tax incentives.
- #034
Christian uses a Barrett M82A1M .50 caliber sniper rifle during target practice and later during the armed confrontation.
- #035
Immediately after Chris remembers Francis's warning to him about returning to legal accounting, the scene shifts to Justine telling him that she wants him to be safe and offering him the job at Blackburn's company. This is meaningful for anyone who has followed Chris's return to legitimate accounting for a company after years of doing black accounting for criminals.
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