Ben Affleck joined GQ magazine for a new cover story where he continued to reflect on what went wrong with his run as Batman in Zack Snyder’s DC Universe. The Oscar winner debuted as the Dark Knight in 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and reprised the superhero in films such as “Justice League” and “The Flash.” He told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 that playing Batman was “awful” and “the worst experience.” Affleck is now opening up more about why.
“There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience,” Affleck told GQ. “And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever. I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
“I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge,” he continued. “But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”
Affleck now runs the production company Artists Equity and said part of his attraction to that “is actually a way of trying to avoid” what went down during his Batman days. He explained: “I want to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cast and a studio apparatus that’s aligned, where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience.”
While the actor had good moments on set and liked creatively his approach to Batman as a “sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne,” a clash started to brew over his Dark Knight and the larger DC Universe being too adult.
“What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” Affleck said. “Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem.’ Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”
Head over to GQ magazine’s website to read Affleck’s latest cover story in its entirety.
