Why splitting from Jennifer Lopez may save Ben Affleck’s career

The Oscar-winning actor, writer and director is now better known as a tabloid fixture and meme-worthy misery guts. Is that about to change?

So misery doesn’t love company after all. Ben Affleck – Oscar-winning director, former Batman and Hollywood’s mopiest A-lister – is being divorced by his wife of two years, Jennifer Lopez, it has been announced. Bennifer has fallen.
News of the impending separation comes at the end of a tumultuous several months for the soon-to-be-ex couple. In February Lopez released her self-financed vanity project, This Is Me Now – a surrealistic and pretentious extended music video that celebrated the rekindling of her romance with Affleck 20 years after they called off their engagement.
This Is Me Now was accompanied by a (flop) album of the same name and by a behind-the-scenes documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. The latter was where the real gold dust was to be found, with its portrayal of Affleck as Lopez’s loyal partner but also a disgruntled and frustrated artist who twitched with existential woe.
“It’s the greatest love story never told…, and you’re making a record about it. That seems kind of like telling it,” he sighs at one point. In another scene, he talks with enthusiasm about his love of camera lenses, not picking up on his wife’s frustration at Taylor Swift declining to cameo in This Is Me Now (Post Malone signed up instead).
Affleck’s timeless sadness is the unofficial theme of the film. Lopez is by turns stressed and overbearing (and that was before she cancelled her arena tour because of poor ticket sales). However, the one-time Batfleck remains in Eeyore mode throughout, pushing back when invited to share his feelings about J-Lo. “Things that are private I’ve always felt are sacred and special because, in part, they’re private,” said Affleck. “This was an adjustment for me.”
Hang-dog, huffy, fed up of the world and all its nonsense – the Affleck we saw in the J-Lo doc was a familiar figure. It was the same Affleck who glowered through the 2023 Grammys, to which he had been dragged by Lopez. The one who gazed into the middle distance when promoting DC’s Justice League with Henry Cavill. Most famously, it was the one who gave world the immortal “sad smoker” meme – that snap of his puffing a cigarette while seemingly suffering through several existential crises at once.
One of those crises no doubt has to do with Affleck’s doomed attempt to escape the celebrity treadmill. As a two-time Oscar winner – for Argo and Good Will Hunting – he clearly sees himself as a modern-day auteur, a Gen X Orson Welles. Besides Argo, he’s directed two thrillers – The Town and Gone Baby Gone – that are exemplary examples of the form. But rather than have his talent acknowledged he has become a tabloid fixture and a living embodiment of midlife misery.
That is unlikely to change in the near future as his next project will see him team up with his soon-to-be-ex spouse. Unstoppable, due September 6, is produced by Affleck together with his old friend Matt Damon (with whom he won his first Oscar for the Good Will Hunting screenplay) and tells the true story of one-legged wrestler Anthony Robles. Moonlight’s Jharrel Jerome plays Robles while Lopez portrays his mother, Judy. After that Affleck and Damon will again buddy up – this time in front of the camera for the Netflix thriller, RIP.
Little is known about RIP but, as a Netflix thriller, it is fair to say it won’t set cinema alight. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be when Affleck was unveiled as the new Batman in 2013. For Affleck, the superhero represented a second chance at proving his virility at the box office. As it transpired, donning the Batsuit ultimately served only to further alienate a troubled star from Hollywood. Justice League became a trapdoor plunging Affleck down into a long dark night of the soul. 
That much is obvious from the film. Puffy of face and listless of gaze, Affleck was visibly struggling with the fallout from the end of his 12-year marriage to Jennifer Garner. And it bled into his performance and his portrayal of Bruce Wayne, who emerged as a washed-up billionaire whose body language screamed midlife crisis. 
“That was a bad experience because of a confluence of things: my own life, my divorce [from Jennifer Garner], being away too much, the competing agendas,” he said to the LA Times in 2022. “Batfleck” was unravelling. Affleck had taken the role after achieving a remarkable comeback with Argo, the Oscar-winning 2012 period thriller in which he had starred and directed. Affleck’s casting as Batman was not uncontroversial – many hardcore Batfans were outraged. And yet, as he prepared to make his debut as the masked vigilante in Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice (2016), he promised to approach this familiar figure from a fresh angle. 
“I wanted a Batman who had been Batman for 20 years, a war-weary Batman,” he told reporters as he looked forward to squaring off against Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel. “He’s living in this grey zone. He’s more broken, not slick. He’s filling the hole in his soul.”
He did justice to the character in the otherwise flawed Batman vs. Superman. Directed by Zack Snyder with all the subtlety of an Olympic hammer thrower robbing a jewellers’, the film was a Wagnerian mess. Yet amidst the lugubrious dialogue the Batfleck delivered a “biff” “pow” performance to remember. He had, since 2014, also been in negotiations to write, direct and star in a standalone Batman film, The Batman. For all the fanboy claims that Affleck was a superhero grifter, nobody could doubt his commitment to his Wayne enterprise. 
The problem was that Affleck’s analysis of Batman as “broken” and needing to “fill a hole in his soul” could have applied equally to the actor. In an interview with Howard Stern, he admitted that by 2015 his relationship with Garner had declined to the point where he was drinking himself to sleep on the couch every night. 
He was desperate to leave – and heartbroken about the prospect of walking out on his three children (one of the reasons he signed on as Batman was to impress his son Samuel). The marriage was over when cameras started rolling on Justice League. Yet for Affleck the woes continued. Warner Brothers was starting to rethink its decision to entrust Zack Snyder with custodianship of the DC Universe. Which meant it was thinking about whether the Batfleck was something it wanted to work with long-term. Batman vs. Superman had under-performed at the box office, its $873 million haul a long way off the $1.4 billion earned by Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015.
The reviews, moreover, had been brutal. “When in doubt, [Snyder] simply slings another ingredient into the mix, be it an irradiated monster, an explosion on government premises, or the sharp smack of masonry on skull,” said the New Yorker. “Incoherently structured… seemingly uninterested in telling a story with clarity and purpose,” agreed the Telegraph. Justice League, released in 2017, fared little better; Affleck’s solo Batman film was shelved.
During the promotional build-up to Batman vs. Superman we caught an early glimpse of Tragic Ben. As the chipper Cavill chimed away, Affleck stared into space. Later, someone paired his crest-fallen body language with Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence. Thus the Sad Affleck meme was born. Soon there was a Sad Affleck for every season. There was that image of Affleck looking despondent while smoking. In another he sat in his car, vaping with eyes shut. 
“Affleck’s was the kind of middle-aged-white-male sadness that the Internet loves to mock – a mocking that depends, simultaneously, on a complete rejection of this sadness, as well as a hedging identification with it,” wrote the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry. “These depressed-Affleck images can arouse both amusement and a sense of poignancy, a touch of Schadenfreude as well as something like sympathy.”
Affleck is nothing if not self-aware. In response to Fry’s references to his “mid-life crisis tattoos”, he tweeted: “I’m doing just fine. Thick skin bolstered by garish tattoos.” 
In a 2022 LA Times interview he said he could understand the amusing aspects of “Sad Affleck”. But it also frustrated him that his children might start to conclude their dad, for all his accomplishments, was ultimately a pitiable figure. “The ‘Sad Affleck’ meme – that was funny to me… But then my kids see it and I think, ‘Oh, are they going to think their dad is fundamentally sad or they have to worry about me?’”
Affleck had long been a movie star with feet of clay. After early success in independent films such the aforementioned Dazed and Confused and Chasing Amy – and his Best Original Screenplay Oscar with Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting – the perception was that he had frittered away his talent on a string of forgettable forays through the 2000s. The likes of Daredevil, Extraction and Smokin’ Aces came and went, while the turkey he made with Jennifer Lopez – the comedy Gigli  – drew laughs for all the wrong reasons.
There were some prophetic moments too; in 2006’s Hollywoodland, Affleck played the original Fifties Superman actor George Reeves as an embittered sad sack fed up of his superhero tights. Taken together, these projects created the persona of Affleck as a smug himbo. No matter the part, something about his public persona rubbed people the wrong way. 
“I think when I was young, people saw me as somebody who had too much or was successful too easily or looked like some kind of cavalier, insincere, callow frat guy,” he confessed to the LA Times.
He wasn’t that guy at all, he feels. He’d grown up in a lower middle class Boston household, the son of an alcoholic father and the scion of a family plagued by mental health issues. His paternal grandmother had killed herself. An uncle had died by suicide. His aunt was a heroin addict. Matinee idol looks and a quarterback’s slightly leery charisma weren’t the only attributes he’d inherited. 
“That was nothing like how I felt. I felt like this sort of insecure, anxious, overly verbal kid from Boston who had tried to break into this business and was dealing with his own stuff. But there is an interesting thing about how we come off versus who we are.”
And yet where he perceived vulnerability, others saw only smugness. That was the quality David Fincher was drawn to when casting Affleck as the slimy, unfaithful husband in 2014’s Gone Girl. He’d wanted an actor with an aptitude for insincere smiles – which is exactly what he saw leafing through old images of Affleck. 
“In Gone Girl there’s a smile the guy has to give when the local press asks him to stand next to a poster of his missing wife,” Fincher said to Playboy. “I flipped through Google Images and found about 50 shots of Affleck giving that kind of smile in public situations. You look at them and know he’s trying to make people comfortable in the moment, but by doing that he’s making himself vulnerable to people having other perceptions about him.”
Affleck knows how he comes across. Promoting Batman vs. Superman, he contrasted himself with Denzel Washington, whom audiences adore no matter what role he is playing. For Affleck, that relationship was different, he acknowledged. People have made up their minds about him. There isn’t a lot he can do about it
“Denzel Washington can play almost anybody – mass murderers – and you go, ‘But he’s all right!’ he said. “There’s something so appealing about him, and I don’t think I have that. You have these qualities that you’re born with. Some of them are good, some of them people don’t like. And you just have to live with it.”
Unfortunately for Affleck one of his defining qualities has been his lurid love life. Might divorce mark a new chapter? Might Batfleck fly again? He had an endearingly goofy quality playing Nike founder Phil Knight in 2023 retro drama Air – he also directed, and many thought he was robbed of an Oscar. He’s currently working on an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, in which he will direct and star, as well as a political thriller. And he has many in Hollywood on his side, who would get behind a second redemption story to go with his Argo comeback. Don’t bet against Sad Ben getting his smile back.