Boston Herald

BEN JUST FINE!

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In spite of a recent New Yorker story that analyzed Ben Affleck’s apparent sadness, the Cambridge-bred star is assuring everyone that he’s OK.

“I’m doing just fine. Thick skin bolstered by garish tattoos,” Affleck tweeted at the magazine, picking fun at his enormous back tattoo that was lately proven very real, despite prior claims.

The Twitter response comes after New Yorker writer Naomi Fry published “The Great Sadness of Ben Affleck,” which picked apart the latest paparazzi photos of the actor as clues to his underlying unhappines­s. The images in question were taken while Affleck was on the beach undergoing a training session for his upcoming Netflix movie “Triple Frontier.”

They show him staring off into the waves as he stands shirtless, with a towel wrapped around his waist and a multicolor­ed fullback tattoo of a phoenix rising from ashes that he previously said was fake.

“Staring at the water before him, his gaze obscure and empty, Affleck is a defeated Roman senator, or, perhaps, the most antiRomant­ic version imaginable of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 Wanderer in the Sea of Fog,” Fry wrote in the story.

As poetic as Fry’s descriptio­n sounds, we have another theory behind Affleck’s appearance in these photos: He’s just a 45-yearold dude who, no longer in his peak-Batman shape, just got the living daylights kicked out of him by a workout. That distant look on his face could very well be him deep in prayer, hoping that he doesn’t lose his breakfast or trying to catch his breath. That expression of desperatio­n could be from thinking about the sore walk back to his car and potentiall­y eating it in front of photograph­ers.

 ?? AP FILE PHOTO ?? Ben Affleck poses at the premier of ‘Justice League’ last year in Los Angeles.
AP FILE PHOTO Ben Affleck poses at the premier of ‘Justice League’ last year in Los Angeles.

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