From the window of the conference room at Artists Equity, Ben Affleck’s production company, you can see Los Angeles spread out for miles to the south—the ocean to the right, Downtown to the left, birds gently flying over everything in between. It’s a Monday in January, not quite two weeks after fires first began to sweep over the city, and the birds are oddly calming: the first few tentative signs of life returning. Affleck—tall, a little rumpled, extending a large mitt of a hand—is as jittery as the rest of us, though largely unscathed, despite reports to the contrary. “I noticed that there’s been stories about me,” he says, almost apologetically. “My house burning down and all these various things.” His house did not burn down, in fact, nor did the one he rents down the block from that house, though like many, he had to leave for a little while. But he is used to having to clear stuff like this up. “I was thinking to myself that this person’s impression”—meaning mine—“of my week is probably formed by three Daily Mail articles that are mostly absurd.”
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Affleck first became widely known with 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which he wrote and starred in alongside his friend Matt Damon. He is nearing his 30th uninterrupted year in the spotlight, which has given him a career and two Academy Awards, and also a level of tabloid scrutiny that in its consistency and vehemence is almost unmatched. “Some people like to follow the soap opera,” Affleck says. “And that soap opera is actually independent of a movie you might make or be in. They’re interested in just the general soap opera and you became a character in that soap opera. You don’t write it, you don’t direct it, you don’t even know you’re in it, but you are.”
This soap opera has provided Affleck with a backstory that is almost classical in its shape: sudden rise, dramatic fall (2003’s Gigli, costarring Affleck’s then and future love interest Jennifer Lopez, is usually cited here), gradual comeback—primarily as a director, with 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, 2010’s The Town, and 2012’s Argo, which won best picture—and then rise again, like the phoenix tattoo that was once grainily photographed on his bare back. None of this is exactly right, though all of it has elements of truth, and Affleck has been shadowboxing with this version of himself, the soap opera character version, for most of his adult life. To this day, he still meets people who assume he is his dim, rock-breaking character from Good Will Hunting, a movie that cast Damon in the genius role (“Matt’s math skills, I am pretty sure, are very far from genius level”), or the attention-plagued playboy that was his public role in the first decade of this century.
In reality, Affleck is 52, a twice-divorced father of three who commutes to an office most days. “I’m a middle-aged guy,” he says, not unhappily. Despite the comeback narrative that journalists still reference, week to week and year to year, he has long been ensconced in the very top levels of Hollywood as a leading man (in the lobby of Artists Equity there is, among other things, Affleck’s old Batman suit) and, more recently, an executive. Affleck founded Artists Equity, which he runs with Damon and Gerry Cardinale, a little over two years ago, with the idea of wresting some control back from the notoriously opaque and complex studio financing system. Air (2023), the last film Affleck directed, was an Artists Equity film; so is The Accountant 2, the sequel to the improbably successful 2016 action film, which Affleck stars in next month.
Throughout all of it, Affleck has retained what I can only describe as his humanity. He is a former Sexiest Man Alive who is also routinely caught on camera dropping packages or spilling coffee. He is still, despite years of being burned by a celebrity-industrial complex that has never left him alone, incredibly honest and talkative in front of an interviewer. At the end of our first conversation, he almost apologizes for how much he’s been speaking—“I mean, I feel like I’m not a great interview in some ways because I’ll just talk about whatever you bring up.” That last part is true.
Ben Affleck: Good example. As it turns out, the FBI did, in fact, visit my house. But this is pretty revealing, right? So I come home and I see there’s a story with sources that say, “Hey, the FBI was at your house.” I’m like, “Well, this is strange.” So I call them and say, “Hey, FBI, were you at my house? Do you want to talk to me?” “Oh, we don’t know.” I get transferred along. Finally somebody who is actually responsible for what was happening was like, “Oh, we had no idea that was your house.” There was a break-in of a federal official’s home in that area. So the FBI went around and whoever lived there, the FBI rang their bell, but because there are photographers sitting outside and these guys have their FBI jackets on, then it’s: The FBI has visited your house. Whoever wrote the story made up something about how it was related to an investigation about a drone that I guess did crash into one of the helicopters two or three miles up Mandeville Canyon. Turns out, no, it wasn’t about that. In fact, we were very far from where the drone was. So it’s like: You’ve seen this event about the FBI at my house. I had no idea. My only involvement was to track it down, figure it out.
I’m aware that it’s absurd and it’s ridiculous. There’s nothing newsworthy at all about the day-to-day events of my life or the conversation I have with one person or another person that’s photographed. And often it’s like the big trick is to say So-and-so does this amid that, imply some correlation between the two. In other words, some broad event is taking place in some way, whether globally or around this person’s life. And look, here they are frustrated with the parking meter. I’m definitely aware of the cosmic joke of it all. What I’ve ended up focusing on is: Look, I know what’s going on in my life. And also, really more importantly, my kids know. We used to have a thing, my ex-wife and I, when they would see something on a supermarket stand, we would say, well, “You know this isn’t always true because if it were, you would have 15 brothers or sisters or whatever the number of stories is where they said that your mom was pregnant.” And I’m really lucky that I have a really good co-parent and partner in Jennifer Garner, the kids’ mom, who’s wonderful and great and we work together well. It’s more of a headache than anything else and there certainly are worse things. I have yet to figure out why I’m an object of—
I think I don’t present in a very careful way. So I’ll go out and pick up the packages or deliveries and I don’t really care that people are there to take my picture. And some people are probably, I guess you’d call them smarter or more strategic because they think, well: “I don’t want to be seen wearing some T-shirt or spilling some drink.” And I just think: Oh fuck it, man, I could give a shit. I just want to get the coffee. So maybe that’s a part of it, because people are accustomed to a more presented, curated image. My life is actually pretty drama-free. And so even if I have the same events that people have—I’m sure in your mind you’re thinking, Oh, well, you just got divorced. That’s not drama-free. And I understand that instinct, but all of this is pretty adult, and for all the sensational stuff that gets written, if somebody sat down and talked to me about it, and I said, “Well, this is really the experience,” their eyes would glaze over with boredom.
Part of it was, “Okay, if I’m going to participate in this, I want to try to do it in an honest way and in a way that’s interesting.” Because I thought it was an interesting examination. Like I mentioned to you before, there are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them. My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers. As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude towards these things. And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that? Because exactly what you said is true. I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that. And I think the thing that I said in that documentary or the piece that they used was where I said, You don’t marry a ship captain and then say, “Well, I don’t like going out in the water.” You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship. And I think it’s important to say that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture. It’s not like you can watch that documentary and go, “Oh, now I understand the issues that these two had.”
I do. The reason that I first did this was because I recognized that the most important thing to me was both being a parent and being present, and that for my own sake, going off to Austin or Louisiana or somewhere to do some movie, I was really missing time I could never get back. My kids were 8, 11, and 14, and I felt like: I don’t want to miss any of this time at all. And so I thought, well, Let me figure out a way to work at home and have the kind of job where I can actually be here and build my schedule around that.
Not on purpose. We were formed by our experiences, right? I remember struggling to be an actor, and just those years seem bigger and longer than they are. It was a fraction of my life at this point. But in my teenage years, early 20s, all that time where you don’t know if it’s ever going to work, or is anyone going to give me a chance? Really, my ambition was just not to have to say, well, “I’m an actor, a filmmaker, writer-slash-waiter,” but to actually get to do that job for a living. And I think when I first had the opportunity to work and for, I don’t know, 15 years or something after that, I was more afraid that I wouldn’t get the opportunity if I stopped moving.
I’m sure it is. My father had ambitions to be an actor and to be a director and to be a writer. And my experience in my childhood was of knowing and seeing a father, when he was around, that I believe at the time was plagued by a sense of not having accomplished what he wanted. He was an auto mechanic and bartender and a janitor and a head of the custodial team at a college and stuff. And so I definitely am aware of that fact, and I’ve talked about this with other actors who come from environments where they feel like there was a parent that couldn’t do it, you know what I mean? And that felt insecure. It’s a lot harder for those people to turn things down. And ironically, the ability to say no, it’s a real paradox in this business, but the ability to say no is actually much more useful.
We’re doing really well. Part of the fundamental thesis of this company was: The artists, the director, the actors, they’re going to get a broader freedom to spend the money in a way that they think maximally benefits the movie. The downside is you also have to take some of the responsibilities. If it goes over budget, well, that eats into your ownership. My belief was this is going to really align incentives in a way that’s going to be healthier for everybody…. The crews’ rates, the last time we looked, were about 15 percent higher than their highest quotes because we do a bonusing system. So if you’re a crew, and we’ve had a couple of different models that we’ve experimented with, but the first was sort of like: “Here’s our goals, and if we reach them, there’s extra compensation in it for everybody on the crew. You’ll get additional bonus.” It creates a more collaborative experience.
I feel like, okay, now we’ve delivered a lot of production that we’ve done and we’ve delivered a lot of movies and we have a bunch the public hasn’t seen but that I feel really good about that we’re about to deliver, and a bunch that we’re about to start production on. So in that sense, I feel like that’s step one. Step two, we have a data project that we’re sort of integrating—
No, actually—when I talk about AI, I’m really talking in broad terms about what we need to do as an industry. I myself am not personally doing AI, obviously, but I am really looking very closely at what this is going to mean for this business and this art form. The first time I saw it, I felt terrified. I thought: We’re going to be destroyed. What we do is clearly just being duplicated here and, oh my gosh, we spend all this energy and time and commitment and going out and filming stories and trying to bring them to life, and here the computer can sort of do this with a keystroke. And what I learned is you actually really can’t do that with a keystroke. And, in fact, what we do is probably more resistant to disintermediation by AI than most other businesses, frankly, and most other jobs. But also that it actually should be a useful tool. Part of my eagerness around it is because I really would like to participate in defining, for example, the residual streams that I know are going to accompany this. If they’re not defined now, it’ll be much harder to do it.
Now, if you’re on Succession, and this is where the guilds I think should negotiate for, you should have the ability on any show, whatever, to say: “I want to opt out of being regenerated.” Because what that means is, well, I may not have said that line or done that. I’m not comfortable with that, but also you have to say, if I opt in, I should be compensated alongside everyone else who’s making money from this because I’m okay with it. You should be able to dictate that, and there should be clearly delineated residual structures that compensate people for that.
I wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable with that, although, I don’t know. No one’s ever asked me that. So I’m not sure. It also feels weird because that movie feels connected to a time when that wasn’t possible. But you’ve seen people’s estates sell and, frankly, great—if your beneficiaries want to sell your likeness to do voice-overs for Visa card or something, I don’t know, who am I to say? Go knock yourself out. I’ll be gone. So if it’s still worth something to my grandkids, go ahead and sell it.
When I got into this—and I wanted to be a director, and I had directed short films and was trying to write and obviously be an actor—it was a time when this sort of DIY thing was just starting. You had Cassavetes, you had independent filmmakers, but the ’90s is when you had Reservoir Dogs and Clerks and Slacker and [1989’s] Do the Right Thing, and there were these movies that were made by people outside of what they call the studio system. And they were interesting and they were ambitious. And what I learned about when I was coming up and had ambitions to start doing this was, “Oh look, if you get Harvey Keitel to do your movie, you can get a million dollars and you can make Reservoir Dogs.” So even writing Good Will Hunting, we always had to keep in mind all these commercial concerns. We thought, Well, it’s not going to be a very expensive movie, because no one’s going to invest in an expensive movie with us in it, so it’s going to be a small movie that takes place in rooms and streets of Boston and doesn’t have all those other high-production-value costs associated with it. And we need to have a movie star, otherwise no one’s going to make it. And so with the movie-star part, we have to make that a supporting part so they don’t have to work as many weeks, but give them all the great monologues and speeches. And so the corporate-mode thing, in terms of thinking about the relationship between what you’re creating and what it costs and how you’re going to get it out to people, has always been a part of the way I thought about it.
As much as I want to be an actor, I find it the most satisfying directing movies. Now, I thought you were going to compare our acting careers, to which I would’ve said, well, Matt learned and knew earlier than I did to really key in on the director as the fundamental basis on which he’s going to make a decision whether to do a movie or not, which was a very wise choice. And also he has certainly had opportunities to do movies that like—it’s not like I was saying, “No, Scorsese, no, Spielberg, I’m not going to be in your movie.” We’re in situations of our opportunities, and we’re subject to that.
I really feel like I started liking my work the most when I arrived at a point of, I could kind of take it or leave it. Where directing became a central focus, and I just thought, well, I’m going to act in things that I just really love.
Late bloomer.
Actually, yeah, in some ways. I think also I’m kind of in awe of actors who can generate the sense of life experience that they haven’t had. That’s not a gift that I have. I think I am able, as an actor at best, to take the sort of fragments of experiences that I’ve had that have had big impacts on me and reassemble them in ways that kind of suit the needs of the character that I’m playing.
A lot of those later on became evident, maybe more evident. And I knew with The Way Back, like, “Okay, look, people know I’m an alcoholic or in recovery, I’m going to have to have a conversation about this.” I didn’t really mind that. I maybe underestimated the degree to which—I didn’t have any ambitions to be the national spokesman for recovering alcoholics. And not because I have any shame with it or anything. I just find that, I’ve been sober for more than five years, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind. It’s not the central preoccupation of my life. But at the time, it was something that I was definitely wrestling with and thinking about. And also I was totally aware that my own lived experience meant that I was able to bring something to it that I thought would make it feel more real and connect with people more. Now, I hadn’t lost a child, thank God, which is what really was at the core of that story, which I can’t imagine anything worse than that in life. So it is both. It is a combination. You bring some things to it and you have to imagine others.
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. So that sort of is what it is.
A few days later, Affleck and I meet again, this time in his office at Artists Equity, where a cabinet holds two Oscars next to the distinctive popcorn shape of an MTV Movie Award. Some of the fire-related tabloid storm around him has subsided, and he seems more at ease. Or maybe it’s just the majestic cardigan from Brunello Cucinelli that he’s wearing. “Very elite, very fashion-forward,” he says, self-deprecatingly.
Well, on the one hand there’s the first feeling, which is like, well, I hope I was clear about, when you asked me about Jen and the documentary and I talked about that and my sort of personal life a little bit, which I don’t mind doing as long as my actual feelings and intentions and beliefs are communicated, which I hope I was clear that really this is somebody I have a lot of respect for. And I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life. But I really hope that whatever you use doesn’t suggest that I have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that. I have nothing but respect. I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something. But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting.
Yeah, there’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue. The truth is, when you talk to somebody, “Hey, what happened?” Well, there is no: “This is what happened.” It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do. And as you get older, this is true for me, I assume it’s true for most people, there is no “So-and-so did this” or “This was the big event.” It’s really, it sounds more like a couple’s therapy session, which—you would tune out of someone else’s couple’s therapy after a while. For one thing, you start going, “Okay, clearly this person has got these issues. Clearly they have these issues.” And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable.
It’s because I’ve been forced into analyzing it to try to figure it out, to understand: What is it? Because naturally you go, like, “Okay, maybe I’ll just wear the same outfit every single day, so the pictures won’t be distinguishable.” Or maybe: “I’ll just look like a slob,” and I’m like, nope—then you become the sad Affleck meme spilling the coffee. Which I have to say I think is kind of funny. So I think it’s just a function of the fact that I’ve spent time thinking about really trying to figure it out.
Physically? Yes, definitely. I used to be very gung ho about like, “Oh, I’ll do the fights, I’ll do the stunts.” And now I am very much, “At what point is the stunt performer going to come in and do this?” Part of it’s because I know they’re just better at it than I am, and you want somebody who looks good doing it. From a totally selfish perspective, you just get banged up and tired. It’s one of the things I was talking to Matt about—he’s going off to do this Chris Nolan movie and doing a lot of stunt rehearsal, and it was kind of like, Boy, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Where you really have to go learn the fights—this is Bourne Identity kind of territory.
But why I think The Accountant was interesting to me—one, I really like fusing drama about characters that are interesting to me, with genres and storytelling tropes that are familiar to the audience and viewed as more commercial. And actually it turns out the audience has, there’s a bigger audience and they’re more patient around some of the dramatic-character stuff that interests me if it comes with a gear shift into more high-stakes visual stuff like that. And The Accountant is very much in keeping with that in the sense that it’s really kind of an interesting character story about this guy and his brother who are unusual characters.
I think about my acting career as a kind of strange outlier. I think I’m really lucky that I was able to do it for long enough to get to a place where I started to feel really good about it and it started to be really fun. I needed to do it a bunch first. And I look back on movies in a pretty objective way now from when I was younger. Like maybe Good Will Hunting, or Shakespeare in Love, or there’s a Boiler Room or Changing Lanes where I’m like, “Oh, that was good. That guy, he didn’t really know what the fuck he was doing but managed to do some stuff that was good.” There’s stuff that I’m not proud of and I think, Oh, this is just horrendous. What was I doing? So I’m lucky personally that I was able to hang around. I think of my career as having two basic arcs in a way where it could have really gone away for me entirely. And directing sort of helped me resurrect that. And it also made me smarter and more careful and more thoughtful.
It’s such a backhanded compliment. It’s like people who meet you and go, “You’re actually a pretty good-looking person,” or “You’re actually a pretty nice guy!” I did definitely have to do a real and very serious comeback. I had to do a lot of work. It was really instructive. One of the best things that happened to me was to become really successful young and to feel all of a sudden a lot of people liked me and I was funny and cool and everybody laughed at even the not-great jokes, and to then become unpopular and uncool and not somebody who, if you had a relationship with that person, it was any good for your career. In fact, maybe even the opposite. And to see what happened to relationships that I really believed were real relationships and friendships as well as just the scale of who I’m talking to, who’s calling you, who isn’t, or just to see your world change in that way.
No, you’re not in control as an actor. That’s an important lesson.
Quite a bit.
There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever. I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, 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.
I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge. But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is 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. Anyway, the point is, this work, this job is actually a way of trying to avoid that situation. I want to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cast and a studio apparatus that’s aligned, where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience.
I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. 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. In terms 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.
But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, “Oh shit, we have a problem.” Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.
I’m not self-aware enough really to know. But I have seen people write about or describe me, whether it’s typically in reviews, which I mostly generally read, reviews certainly of the major critics that I know or I’m interested in. I was just reading something the other day, where what stands out is: “Affleck, of course, works successfully as,” I think it was, “a tarnished leading man.” Where I was like, “Oh, I see, this is my wheelhouse.” Sort of the Gone Girl archetype, ranging from that to “Yes, he’s our leading guy, he sort of seems that way, but we all know that underneath is a profoundly flawed person.” And I am drawn to that—everybody is a flawed person and that’s what makes them interesting. So maybe I play into that. I think also part of that has got to be, it’s been, I don’t know, almost 30 years that I’ve been doing this in the sort of public or semipublic life. Imagine just the volume of stuff that— and particularly certain years where it was just relentlessly negative and exaggerated, but nonetheless—the impression of a “tarnished leading man” sort of makes sense to me. Because I know, for example, people will see Matt Damon one way and me another way. Just the classic comparison.
Oh, dude, what I didn’t realize when we made that movie was that everybody who saw that movie would more or less assume that we were those characters. I really thought, Oh, I’ll turn in a performance as this guy, and the more convincing it is, the better it will be for me, because the whole goal of that movie, really for Matt and I in terms of why we started, was to get work as actors. It was very easy to convince people since it was the first time they saw me that that was exactly who I was.
The thing about that is, I’ve read some interviews of mine from back then, and I kind of think: This is a person who’s trying to use the longest words that they know. I felt a little bit like my grandfather. I was trying to be like, “Look, I’m not stupid. Look, I’m smart.” Which is unfortunate because that energy of, “Look at me, look, I’m this, look I’m that,” always has the opposite effect. It’s like, why is this guy selling me this car so hard?
That is one of the achievements of my career on which I’m willing to pat myself on the back. I believe that may be at least top five all-time DVD commentaries. By the way, nobody said anything to me. I don’t think any of the other people listened to it or gave a fuck until years later when it was played. And I was kind of shocked and appalled that I went on there and started being like…. I mean, that’s all true. Everything I said was a hundred percent true, but that’s the point. You’re not supposed to go on there and tell all of the truth.
I never expected, “Oh, this is going to be genius.” I thought, I’m going to go do a big Hollywood action movie and I love it. And yes, during the movie, I was kind of surprised to find that sometimes they weren’t all that interested in making sense. I remember Billy Bob [Thornton] was having a long conversation about a scene in the space mission control or whatever it was, and he was like, “No, that’s okay, man. I can stop talking about it. I just kind of like to be in the kind of movies that make sense, you know what I mean? But fuck it, we don’t have to do that. We’re not doing that on this one. Fuck it.” And I was the only person who was kind of like, “Okay, I guess we don’t operate by those other rules here.” But there’s a sense of being small and of this thing being big. And so I felt like a little ant on the elephant when I would shoot my mouth off about the conversation I had with Michael [Bay, the director of Armageddon] about why is it easier to train oil drillers to be astronauts than to train astronauts to drill a hole in the ground?
Good Will Hunting came out—we were coming out the same month as another film, which I was told was a disaster and was going to be a terrible bomb, which was Titanic. Not a bomb! But actually it was such a phenomenal success that I think it really helped our movie because I think people would go to see Titanic and it would be sold out and they’d be like, “Fuck, what else is here? I guess we’ll see the Boston kids in that movie with Robin Williams.” So I didn’t quite have a sense of being famous in any way. But then, if there’s a kind of overnight experience, I had it, because the Oscars that year happened to be the highest rated in the last 30 years or whatever because Titanic, this massively popular movie, was nominated. The vast majority of people that watched that show, it was tens of millions, certainly hadn’t seen the movie, but our little kind of fairy-tale story was very appealing. And so I was shooting Dogma and we had flown back to LA to do the Oscars and flew back to Pittsburgh. And when I got back there, I remember there was a huge crowd outside our little crummy trailers, and I took pictures. Because I was like, This is amazing. I’m going to remember this. I thought, Oh, this is a fleeting thing. I was 25, and I thought, This is insane. And it always felt to me like one of those movies where one character goes in another character’s body. Like, oh, this is where you’re going to get to be in the body of Ringo Starr or something.
It was somebody else’s life. And it took me a long time actually to be able to harmonize that sense. So I do remember that shift, to answer your question. I remember feeling very small. And then I didn’t feel big, but I felt thrust out in front. And I remember feeling not sure. Like: How does a person behave? What does a person do? How does a person handle this? And sometimes I did stupid things and feel embarrassed of ridiculous, goofy things I said, because I really didn’t know, like, am I here doing Jackass or something? Am I just running through the background streaking across the Oscars naked and that’s my character? You can feel uninvited or, it’s going to go away soon. And so, “Oh, you might as well turn around and mug at the camera because clearly they’re going to usher you off.” And it took a long time. There’s no playbook.
I would’ve taken Saving Private Ryan. If Martin Scorsese called me and told me to play a waiter, I would take it. Steven Spielberg is one of the great filmmaking architects to ever live. I feel that way about Chris Nolan. I may go visit Matt on the set just to watch Nolan direct. I’m not even kidding at all.
No. There are a couple different approaches to acting that I’ve noticed other actors have. Some look at it as a zero-sum game. Like if this person’s in that part, they’re in my way. And if they were lopped off at the knees, then I could either move up one spot in the long line or I might actually have that part. I feel like you kind of make your own work. And I don’t sit around being like, “Why is Marty hiring Leo? Should be me.” I really don’t…. If I was going to obsess over something, it would be more about how I really see myself as a director. I think that’s what, if you asked me, is there something that you would like to be recognized for? If you pick one thing, I would say it was that. But I also don’t feel that I’ve been denied or thwarted. I feel really lucky.
Because it’s so consuming. The one regret I have about all the movies that I’ve directed is the amount of time it’s taken me away from my kids. I love making art. I loved making The Town. But I was away from my kids for long periods of time. There’s little chunks that I missed, and that doesn’t feel good. And I think part of what’s great about this Artists Equity job, part of why I love it, is because I’m in LA. When we’re done at 2:30, I’m going to go, and I’ll be home at 3:45 when my kids get off the bus. And I’m able to construct a life that does that. And that means more to me than any of it. That makes me happier.
Zach Baron is GQ’s senior special projects editor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of GQ with the title “Step Into Mr. Affleck’s Office”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Gregory Harris
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Teddy Charles at Nevermind Agency
Skin by Jo Strettell using Sisley Paris
Tailoring by Susie & Hasmik Kourinian
Set design by Stefan Beckman at Exposure NY
Produced by Camp Productions