Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | March 25, 2025
Ben Affleck gives some of the best, most thoughtful celebrity interviews in the business. He doesn’t do many, but when he does, they’re usually illuminating. Ahead of The Accountant 2, he sat down for a long, wide-ranging conversation with GQ, where he once again reflected on his career and personal life. He’s self-aware, smart, and disarmingly self-deprecating.
In the interview, Affleck talks about his divorce from Jennifer Lopez, making it clear that it wasn’t caused by one major incident, that it wasn’t dramatic, and that he still has a lot of love and respect for her. He also talks about his relationship with Jennifer Garner—“who’s wonderful and great and we work together well”—and about the “absurd,” “cosmic joke” that is fame itself.
He discusses how his casual approach to public life—like picking up packages in sweats or spilling coffee—has led to things like the Sad Affleck meme (which, for the record, he finds hilarious).
“I think I don’t present in a very careful way,” he told GQ.
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 f**k it, man, I could give a sh**. 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.
There’s a lot in the piece—he revisits Good Will Hunting, talks about his misery filming Justice League, compares his approach to acting and directing with Matt Damon’s, and dives deep into his new studio, Artists Equity—but the part that made me laugh out loud was his return to the Armageddon DVD commentary.
If you’ve never heard it, the commentary is infamous. Affleck is brutally honest about the movie’s many flaws, riffing on his too-white teeth, the film’s ridiculous science, Bruce Willis’ chilliness toward the younger cast, and Michael Bay’s chaotic energy. The running bit—“Why is it easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than to train astronauts to become oil drillers?”—culminates in Bay telling him to “shut the f**k up.”
In the GQ interview, Affleck shares a perfect little anecdote from set featuring Billy Bob Thornton—and I swear, just reading it in Thornton’s voice makes it ten times funnier.
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 f**k it, we don’t have to do that. We’re not doing that on this one. f**k 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?
It’s a great interview. You can (and should) read the whole thing here (note: it’s paywalled).
