Ben Affleck explains how Jennifer Garner divorce helped him play more complex roles
Affleck recently got out of a relationship with actress Ana de Armas
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Ben Affleck revealed how his divorce from Jennifer Garner led to him improving his acting skills.
The actor, who starred in the 2020 film "The Way Back," discussed his acting career and how he's rethought his approach to the art form in recent years during a roundtable discussion for The Hollywood Reporter that included fellow stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Delroy Lindo, Gary Oldman, John David Washington and Steven Yeun.
In describing his role as an alcoholic former high school basketball star who reluctantly agrees to act as the coach for his old Catholic school, Affleck explained that gaining more life experience has helped him tackle more complex roles as he gets older.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"The movie was much more about the fact that — whether it's having lived enough years, having seen enough ups and downs, having had children and divorce — I'm at a point now in my life where I have sufficient life experience to bring to a role to make it really interesting for me," he explained. "I'm not good enough to just invent it from whole cloth, you know? I didn't have to do research for the alcoholism aspect of the movie — that was covered. It was the Daniel Day-Lewis approach to that!"
BEN AFFLECK BATTLES ALCOHOLISM IN NEW FILM, 'THE WAY BACK'
The actor and the former "Alias" star officially divorced in 2018 after a long separation. They were officially married in 2005.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Jennifer Garner opened up about what it was like starting a family with Ben Affleck in WSJ. Magazine's March Women's Style Issue. (Getty Images)
In a previous interview with The New York Times, Affleck described the split with Garner as the biggest "regret" of his life and noted that his addiction played a huge part in the rift 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’re trying to make go away," Affleck told the outlet last year. "You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break."
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Fortunately, he and Garner remain friendly and continue to co-parent their three kids, Violet, 15, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, 12, and Samuel, 8.
Elsewhere in his chat with The Hollywood Reporter, the actor explained how his alcoholism, including his recent relapse, actually helped him portray his character in "The Way Back."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Ben Affleck described how his real-life alcoholism helped him play his role in 'The Way Back.' (Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Warner Bros.)
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"I'm a recovering alcoholic and I played an alcoholic in the movie. It's really about grief and losing a child, which, thank God, I have not experienced, and is probably the worst thing you can experience. But also, a lot of it is about alcoholism," he said. "Alcoholism, in and of 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 trying to figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, how you want your life to look and what kind of ethics you want to live by. So yes, I'm an alcoholic. Yes, I had a relapse. Yes, I went into recovery again. And then I went and did that movie."