Ben Affleck revealed how his divorce from Jennifer Garner led him to improve his acting skills.
The actor, who starred in the 2020 film “The Way Back”, discussed his acting career and how he rethought his approach to art form in recent years during a roundtable discussion for The Hollywood Reporter that included the stars Sacha Baron Cohen and Delroy Lindo, Gary Oldman, John David Washington and Steven Yeun.
In describing his role as a former high school basketball star who reluctantly agrees to act as the coach of his former Catholic school, Affleck explained that gaining more life experience helped him face more complex roles as he aged.
“The film was much more about the fact that – whether I have lived long enough, seen many ups and downs, having children and divorced – I am at a point now in my life where I have enough life experience to bring to a role that makes it really interesting for me, “he explained. “I’m not good enough to invent from scratch, you know? I didn’t have to do research on the alcoholism aspect of the film – that was covered. It was Daniel Day-Lewis’s approach to that!”
BEN AFFLECK BATTLES ALCOHOLISM IN NEW FILM, ‘THE WAY BACK’
The actor and former “Alias” star officially divorced in 2018 after a long separation. They officially married in 2005.
Jennifer Garner talked about starting a family with Ben Affleck at WSJ. Women’s March issue of the magazine.
(Getty Images)
In a previous interview with The New York Times, Affleck described the separation with Garner as the biggest “regret” of his life and noted that his addiction played an important role in the separation between them.
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“People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they are trying to make it go away,” Affleck told the outlet last year. “You’re trying to feel better about eating or drinking or having sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But it ends up making your life worse. So you do more to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain begins. It becomes a vicious cycle that you cannot break. “
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Fortunately, he and Garner remain friendly and co-parents with their three children, Violet, 15, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, 12, and Samuel, 8.
In another part of his conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor explained how his alcoholism, including his recent relapse, helped him portray his character in “The Way Back”.
Ben Affleck described how his real-life alcoholism helped him to play his part in ‘The Way Back’.
(Paras Griffin / Getty Images for Warner Bros.)
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“I am a recovering alcoholic and I played an alcoholic in the film. It’s really about grieving and losing a child, which, thank God, I haven’t experienced, and it’s probably the worst thing you can experience. But also, a lot of that is about alcoholism, “he said.” Alcoholism, by itself, and compulsive behavior are not inherently super interesting, but what is sometimes interesting is what you discover about yourself in the course of recovery and try to find out what went wrong, how to fix it, how you want your life to be and what kind of ethics you want to follow. So yes, I am an alcoholic. Yes, I had a relapse. Yes, I went into recovery again. And then I went and made that movie. “