Regrets? He’s had a few
Affleck gets candid about his ex-wife and his decision to quit The Batman
Ben Affleck has a few regrets. Divorcing Jennifer Garner is one. Not getting to direct his stand-alone Batman flick might be another.
The two-time Oscar winner is doing the press rounds for his upcoming movie, The Way Back, which casts him as a recently widowed recovering addict who mounts a comeback by coaching the basketball team at his former high school. But in a new interview with the New York Times, Affleck, who has endured a very public struggle with alcoholism, was candid about his failures off the screen.
“The biggest regret of my life is this divorce,” he told the publication. The Argo star wed Garner in 2005 and they share three children together.
His alcohol abuse, he says, is partially to blame for the disintegration of his marriage.
“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” he said.
“What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.” The marriage officially ended in 2018, and the actor moved on with Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live producer Lindsay Shookus and Playboy model Shauna Sexton.
Elsewhere in the interview, Affleck opened up on the real reason he exited The Batman, alluding to a troubled shoot on 2017’s Justice League. Written and directed by Zack Snyder, Justice League was both a commercial and critical disappointment, marred by a troubled shoot (Snyder stepped down after the death of his daughter) and a drastically retooled final cut overseen by Joss Whedon.
The 47-year-old has played the Dark Knight three times.