Ben Affleck Gets Candid on Jennifer Lopez, Gone Girl & His New Netflix Film Animals

Ben Affleck doesn’t do small talk with the press very often anymore. So when he agrees to sit for a wide-ranging cover interview, you know he’s going to say something that lands. This week, the 54-year-old actor and director gave Variety a genuinely revealing conversation — the kind where he weighs in on ex-wife Jennifer Lopez’s history of awards snubs, settles a twelve-year-old debate about his most infamous movie scene, and talks, with unusual candor, about losing both of his parents within months of each other.

The timing is no accident. Affleck is days away from the release of Animals, the new Netflix crime thriller he both directs and stars in, which hits theaters and the streamer on October 9. He spent part of last week walking red carpets for it — he attended the world premiere at the Westwood Village Theater in Los Angeles on October 1, then turned up in Mexico City on October 4 — and now he’s doing the interview circuit. But this particular sit-down went far beyond the usual “tell us about your new movie” talking points. Here’s what he actually said.

Rare praise for Jennifer Lopez — and a theory about why awards keep overlooking her

It’s no secret that Affleck and Jennifer Lopez’s reunion marriage didn’t last. After ending an engagement in 2004, the two got married in July 2022, and Lopez filed for divorce on the second anniversary of their wedding ceremony, with the split finalized in early 2025. Two years after the divorce, Affleck doesn’t strike a bitter note when her name comes up. If anything, the opposite.

Asked by Variety‘s Matt Donnelly why Lopez keeps getting “overlooked” by the Academy — she’s never been nominated despite acclaimed performances in Hustlers and last year’s Kiss of the Spider Woman — Affleck didn’t hedge. “I’m biased,” he said. “I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for what she can do.”

Then he offered what might be the most Affleck line of the whole interview: a shrug at the entire awards-industrial complex. What he’s found, he explained, is that commercial success doesn’t always line up with his own taste, and that awards season is “a part of this weird, subjective business that people bring a lot of their own stuff to.” Translation: the Oscars are people voting on movie prizes, not some divine ledger of who was actually best.

“I don’t always think the right person won the right award,” he added. And just in case anyone was treating the statuette like scripture, he deadpanned that he doesn’t believe you “die and go to heaven and God says, ‘This was the actual best picture in 1986.'”

There’s a layer of personal investment here beyond the ex-husband angle. Kiss of the Spider Woman — the musical in which Lopez starred and earned real awards buzz — was produced by Artists Equity, the company Affleck co-founded with Matt Damon. Affleck was right there on the carpet at its New York premiere last October, telling Extra that Lopez was “in the kind of role that she was born to play” and that she “really does it all in this movie: the acting and singing and dancing.” He’s not just defending her out of courtesy. He put money behind her.

He also gave Lopez — and first ex-wife Jennifer Garner — their due for something Hollywood’s old guard used to sneer at: the hustle of being a modern star. “I’ve seen both Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Garner do amazing jobs cultivating and accruing value in those spaces,” he said of social media and personal branding. “Don’t think that’s not real work.” His punchline was pure self-deprecation: “I couldn’t do it. What am I going to do, unbox something?”

That ‘Gone Girl’ shower scene: no prosthetic, no debate

Every few months, the internet rediscovers the full-frontal shower scene in Gone Girl and asks the same question. This week, Affleck finally answered it, once and for all. “I wore no prosthesis,” he told Variety. “I’ve only worn one in one film, Hollywoodland. It was a nose.”

Twelve years after the David Fincher thriller came out, the scene still gets talked about more than plenty of the film’s actual plot twists. And honestly, Affleck seems a little amused by the staying power of the discourse. Back at the 2014 Hollywood Film Awards, he joked that Fincher had initially promised the camera would never tilt down far enough to reveal anything — and that if “you’re gonna have one chance for America to see your junk, you want it to be cold.”

But the jokes sit alongside genuine reverence. In a separate conversation with Letterboxd published October 6, Affleck called working with Fincher “the great privilege of my life,” describing the director as “one of the absolute greatest filmmakers ever to live.” He said he trusted Fincher so completely that “I was willing to do anything for him. Like be naked.”

He also admitted something that makes the film’s famous menace hit differently: a decade later, he’s “still afraid” of his co-star Rosamund Pike. Pike played Amy Dunne, one of cinema’s great predators, and Affleck confessed that she remains “enigmatic and mysterious” to him. “I don’t know that I ever really got to know her,” he said. Which, given how terrifying Amy is, sounds like the healthiest possible outcome.

“That’s what we get”: on losing both parents and rethinking his life

The most quietly affecting part of the interview had nothing to do with movies. Affleck lost both of his parents this year — his father Timothy in April, his mother Chris Anne in June after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer. He’d already started talking about it during press for Animals, telling Kerry Washington in a sit-down that the double loss was “just sort of a big thing” he was still sitting with. The Variety interview went deeper.

“One of the things you grapple with at my age when parents die is there’s a comfort and awareness in knowing this is how it’s supposed to go,” he said. “When I go, it will be hard for my children, but none of us want it any other way.”

He remembered a conversation with his mother near the end of her life. “My mom said to me at the end of her life: ‘God, I thought 84 years would seem longer.’ And I thought, ‘I bet, because I thought 54 would seem longer.'” His summation: “That’s what we get. We get this much time, and it’s a reminder not to put anything off or fix it later.”

The grief has reshaped how he thinks about work, specifically where he works. Affleck shares custody of his three children with Garner, and he told Variety he doesn’t want to burn those years on location somewhere far from home. “I’m divorced, I have shared custody, and I don’t want to miss these years,” he said. “My kids are here, and their life is flying by. I don’t want to have to be in Shreveport or New Mexico in order to work.” He acknowledged the privilege in that — “I know some people don’t have the luxury of making those choices” — and credited Los Angeles for having “the best crews in the world” anyway.

Batman, the ‘Smoking Ben’ meme, and a hard no on politics

The Variety cover also touched on the recurring greatest-hits questions Affleck must be sick of by now. The “Smoking Ben” meme — the viral photos of him looking weary with a cigarette — came up. So did Batman, a role he inhabited through the DC years and has since looked back on with his characteristic mix of candor and distance. And yes, someone asked about running for office, because when you play a mayoral candidate in a movie, apparently people start getting ideas.

That last one got a firm answer. Affleck has been calling a political career a “difficult grind” and has made clear, including during recent press for Animals, that he has no interest in running, even after co-stars and friends nudged him toward it. His co-star Steven Yeun put it bluntly in recent interviews: “He doesn’t want to.” Given how much Affleck currently resents being pulled away from his kids by work, trading film sets for the campaign trail doesn’t exactly scan.

Why ‘Animals’ matters — for Affleck and for Artists Equity

All of this press is, at the end of the day, in service of Animals, and it’s a project Affleck clearly believes in. He stars as Mark, a Los Angeles mayoral candidate, opposite Kerry Washington as his wife Abigail; when their son is kidnapped, the couple has hours to raise the ransom, forcing them into compromises that threaten everything they’ve built. Gillian Anderson plays the candidate’s fixer, Steven Yeun his campaign manager.

It’s also Affleck the director returning to the crime genre that made his name behind the camera — Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and the Oscar-winning Argo were the run that established him as one of Hollywood’s most serious filmmakers, before Air reminded everyone he still had it. The script was written by Connor McIntyre with revisions by Affleck and Billy Ray, and the film was produced by Artists Equity, the company he launched with Damon to bring back mid-budget adult dramas for grown-ups.

That bet is paying off. The Rip, Artists Equity’s earlier Netflix collaboration, became the year’s biggest movie on the streamer so far — proof that the audience Affleck keeps talking about is still out there. Whether Animals joins it will be decided in the next few days, when it lands on October 9.

If the interview is any indication of where Affleck’s head is at, it’s this: he’s done chasing anyone’s approval, whether it’s the Academy’s or the internet’s. He’s got a company making the movies he wants to make, kids he wants to be present for, and a clear-eyed sense of what the other stuff is actually worth. “At the end of the day,” as he put it about awards, “it’s just a bunch of people voting on movie prizes.” You could say the same about memes, box office rankings, and most of the noise around a movie star’s life. Affleck, at 54, seems to have figured out which parts to take seriously — and, just as importantly, which parts to laugh at.

Source: Just Jared