Ben Affleck Reveals Why His Batman Experience Was ‘Excruciating’ and Full of ‘Significant Failings
Ben Affleck recently sat down with GQ for a new cover story where he further reflected on his challenging time as Batman in Zack Snyder’s DC Universe. Affleck first donned the cape and cowl in 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and reprised the role in Justice League and The Flash. However, in 2022, he told the Los Angeles Times that playing Batman was “awful” and “the worst experience.” Now, Affleck is diving deeper into the reasons behind his frustration.
Ben Affleck Reflects on “Batman”
“There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience,” Affleck told GQ. “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.”
Affleck was candid about his struggles, admitting that his emotional state during this period impacted his work. “What I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness,” he explained. “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.”
He also acknowledged that, despite his creative ambitions for Batman as an “older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne,” his portrayal started to feel misaligned with the intended audience. “What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” Affleck admitted. “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.”
Ben Affleck’s Work With Artists Equity
Now, as the head of his production company, Artists Equity, Affleck says that part of the reason he’s focusing on his company is to avoid the misalignments he faced during his Batman days.
“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,” he explained. “The Accountant 2” is out in theaters on April 25.
More On:Movies