Ben Affleck Opens Up About His Time On Justice League
In a recent interview with GQ (via Deadline), Ben Affleck expressed how difficult his time playing Batman was due to his struggles with alcohol and the challenges that came with playing such an iconic role. Affleck played the character across four separate films, the last of which being 2023’s The Flash.
Affleck began explaining that his experience wasn’t all negative when starting out in the role. “I loved Batman v Superman, and I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two.” The actor went on to say “In of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.”
However, when talking about his time on the set of Justice League, he had this to say. “I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations.” The actor went on to talk about his lack of enthusiasm during filming, “I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
These comments coincide with a previous interview where Affleck opened up about his alcoholism. When talking with The New York Times in 2020, he said, “I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart.” He then went on to say that this escalated during the filming of Justice League in particular. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever, but that ends up making your life worse.”
In his talk with GQ, he also went on to talk about how this affected him as an actor. “I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge.” The actor also added that “what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”
This realisation is one of the reasons why Affleck stepped away from The Batman, which he was originally intending to write and direct as well as star in the lead role. He explained to the Times that, after showing someone the script for the film, they said, “‘the script is good. I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went through again.'”
Affleck has now been sober for five whole years, a lot of it he tried to do anonymously.
“If I could have, I would’ve kept the fact that I’m sober anonymous because I think it works better that way. And I didn’t ask for that to become something people knew about. But I can’t complain about it either. I understood doing this job and doing this life, if something happened like that, people were going to know about it, and they did. And I have arrived at a place where I think of that experience as part of my life in authentically grateful ways, whereas I didn’t think such a thing was possible before.”
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