Affleck, 47, has been working like a madman to get his career back on track. The hard truth is that the outcome is not guaranteed
Ben Affleck in Los Angeles, Jan. 11, 2020. Affleck said of his public relapse last year: “I wish it didn’t happen. I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my kids to see. Jen and I did our best to address it and be honest.”
Image: Magdalena Wosinska/The New York Times
Warning: This is not one of those celebrity profiles that uses a teaspoon of new information to flavor a barrel of ancient history. There is no paragraph where the star and the writer pretend to be pals — gag — while doing an everyday-person activity. What was everyone eating? Who cares. No, you will not get served the obligatory canned quote from Matt Damon.
This is Ben Affleck, raw and vulnerable, talking extensively for the first time about getting sober (again) and trying to recalibrate his career (again).
Affleck, Oscar-winning writer, director of the Oscar-winning “Argo,” better actor than you remember — and, yes, alcoholic, divorcé and proud possessor of a mythical back tattoo — has four movies coming out this year. Dad Bod Batman has been banished, and actual films are back on his docket, including his first all-on-him movie in four years: “The Way Back,” a poignant sports drama that arrives in theaters March 6. Affleck plays a reluctant high school basketball coach with big problems — he’s a puffy, willful, fall-down drunk who blows up his marriage and lands in rehab.
You read that correctly.
“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,” he said a couple of Sundays ago during a two-hour interview at a beachside spot in Los Angeles. “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. That’s at least what happened to me.”
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