Ben Affleck

• 1. Introduction

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  Ben Affleck directed Argo, and for it he collected the Golden Globe, the Directors Guild Award and the BAFTA for Best Director without ever being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. No director had done that before him. The oddity suits a career built on reversals. Affleck is an American actor and filmmaker whose honors include two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes. He has been a child performer on public television, a screenwriter, a studio leading man, a tabloid fixture and a director. His path ran through a bruising public downturn, and through a struggle with alcohol that he has talked about on his own terms. How did a boy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, end up writing an Oscar-winning screenplay with a friend? Why did a star so heavily exposed decide to step away? And what pulled him back, first in front of the camera and then behind it?

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• 2. Cambridge Beginnings

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  Berkeley, California, is where Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt was born on the 15th of August 1972. The family moved to Massachusetts when he was three. They lived first in Falmouth, where his brother Casey was born, and then settled in Cambridge.

  Christopher Anne "Chris" Boldt, his mother, taught elementary school and had a Harvard education. His father, Timothy Byers Affleck, was an aspiring playwright who was "mostly unemployed." He worked sporadically as a carpenter, auto mechanic, bookie, electrician, bartender and janitor at Harvard. In the mid-1960s he had acted and stage-managed with the Theater Company of Boston.

  Timothy Affleck described his own drinking as a "severe, chronic problem with alcoholism." His son remembered him drinking "all day... every day." When his parents divorced and his father left the house, eleven-year-old Ben felt a sense of "relief." His father kept drinking heavily and spent two years homeless on the streets of Cambridge. When Ben was 16, his father entered a rehabilitation facility in Indio, California. He stayed there for 12 years to protect his sobriety and worked at the facility as an addiction counselor.

  Theater outings with their mother were a regular part of life for Ben and Casey. The household was liberal and politically active, and it was full of people who worked in the arts. The boys were encouraged to make their own home movies. A family friend named David Wheeler later remembered Ben as "very bright and intensely curious." Their mother was friends with a Cambridge-area casting director, so the brothers auditioned for local commercials and films. Ben first acted professionally at the age of seven. His mother put his wages into a college trust fund. She hoped he would become a teacher and worried that acting was an insecure and "frivolous" profession. When he was 13, he filmed a children's television program in Mexico. He learned Spanish during a year of traveling around the country with his mother and brother.

  At Cambridge Rindge and Latin, a drama teacher named Gerry Speca inspired Affleck to act in school theater productions. He grew close to a fellow student, Matt Damon, whom he had known since the age of eight. Damon was two years older, but the pair had "identical interests" and both wanted acting careers. They traveled to New York for auditions and saved for train and airline tickets in a joint bank account. Affleck scored well on his SATs but was an unfocused student with poor attendance. He spent a few months at the University of Vermont studying Spanish, chosen for its closeness to his girlfriend. He left after fracturing his hip playing basketball. At 18 he moved to Los Angeles and spent a year and a half at Occidental College studying Middle Eastern affairs. While there, he also directed student films.

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• 3. Bit Parts to Oscar

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  The Voyage of the Mimi, a PBS series that began airing in 1984, was Affleck's biggest success as a child. A sequel, The Second Voyage of the Mimi, followed in 1988. Both were produced for sixth-grade science classes, and he worked on them "sporadically" between the ages of eight and fifteen. He later said his career did not come from a pushy parent, and that he "kind of chanced into something." As a teenager he appeared in the ABC after school special Wanted: A Perfect Man in 1986 and the television film Hands of a Stranger in 1987. In 1989 he turned up in a Burger King commercial.

  After high school, Affleck tried New York briefly in search of acting work. What followed, in his words, was a series of "knock-around parts, one to the next." He played Patrick Duffy's son in the 1991 television film Daddy. In 1992 he made an uncredited appearance as a basketball player in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film and played a prep school student in School Ties. He was a high school quarterback in the NBC series Against the Grain in 1993. A year later he played a steroid-abusing football player in Body to Die For: The Aaron Henry Story.

  Richard Linklater cast Affleck as a high school bully in Dazed and Confused in 1993. Linklater wanted a likable actor for a villainous role. Affleck was "big and imposing," but also, in the director's words, "so smart and full of life... I just liked him." Affleck later said Linklater helped demystify the process of making a film.

  Glory Daze in 1995 gave Affleck his first starring film role, as an aimless art student. A critic for The New York Times praised his "affably mopey performance." That year he also played a bully in Kevin Smith's comedy Mallrats, and he became friends with Smith during filming. Affleck had begun to fear a career of "throwing people into their lockers." Smith answered by writing him a lead role in the romantic comedy Chasing Amy, released in 1997. It became his breakthrough. Janet Maslin of The New York Times admired his "wonderful ease" in the part. Later in 1997 he played a recently returned Korean War veteran in Going All the Way.

  The screenplay for Good Will Hunting began in 1992, when Damon wrote a 40-page script for a playwriting class at Harvard University. He asked Affleck to act out the scenes with him in front of the class. Damon later moved into Affleck's apartment in Los Angeles, and the two began working on it in earnest. They wrote mostly through improvisation sessions. The story was set partly in their hometown of Cambridge and drew on their own experiences. Their goal was to give themselves "an acting reel."

  In 1994, when Affleck was 22, they sold the screenplay to Castle Rock. Rob Reiner and William Goldman were among the industry figures who gave them notes. A lengthy dispute with Castle Rock over a suitable director followed. Affleck and Damon eventually persuaded Miramax to buy the screenplay instead. The two friends moved back to Boston for a year before production began. Gus Van Sant directed, and the cast included Damon, Affleck, Minnie Driver and Robin Williams.

  Jay Carr of The Boston Globe said Affleck brought "a beautifully nuanced tenderness" to the working-class friend of Damon's mathematical prodigy. Affleck and Damon won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and he remains the youngest person to win an Oscar for screenwriting, at 25. He called the period "dreamlike" and compared it to a scene in an old movie when a newspaper "comes spinning out of the black on to the screen." Nearly two decades later, in October 2016, the two men staged a one-off live reading of the script at New York's Skirball Theater.

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• 4. Stardom and Backlash

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  Michael Bay watched Affleck's screen test for Armageddon in 1998 and dismissed him as "a geek." Good Will Hunting had not yet been released, so Bay had little to go on. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer insisted that Affleck would be a star. The studio still required him to lose weight, get tanned and have his teeth capped before filming. The film cast him opposite Bruce Willis as a blue-collar driller sent by NASA to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. It was a box office success, and Daphne Merkin of The New Yorker called him "clearly bound for stardom."

  Shakespeare in Love, also released in 1998, gave Affleck a supporting part as an arrogant English actor. His then-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow starred in it. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and the cast took the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast. Dogma, a religious satire by Kevin Smith, premiered at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and reunited him with Damon as a pair of fallen angels. The same year, Sandra Bullock co-starred with him in Forces of Nature, where he played a groom whose journey to his own wedding is disrupted by a free-spirited traveling companion.

  John Frankenheimer was directing his last feature film, Reindeer Games, in 2000. Affleck, interested in directing himself, shadowed him through pre-production. Frankenheimer said Affleck had "a very winning, likable quality about him." On screen, Affleck played a hardened criminal opposite Charlize Theron. He followed it with a ruthless stockbroker in Boiler Room. In 2001 he reunited with Michael Bay for the war drama Pearl Harbor, which critics derided. In 2002 he played the CIA analyst Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears. Stephen Holden of The New York Times felt he "simply lacks the gravitas for the role." Changing Lanes, also from 2002, went better. Affleck called it an "amazing experience," and Robert Koehler of Variety saw one of his "most thoroughly wrought" performances.

  Pearl Street Films was set up by Affleck and Damon in 1998, and it was named for the street that ran between their childhood homes. In 2000 they co-founded LivePlanet with Sean Bailey and Chris Moore, hoping to bring the Internet into mainstream television and film. Its biggest success was the documentary series Project Greenlight, which gave first-time filmmakers a chance to direct a feature. It aired on HBO and later Bravo, and it was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality Program in 2002-2004 and 2005. Push, Nevada, an ABC mystery that Affleck created with Bailey in 2002, folded a viewer game into the story. ABC canceled it after seven episodes because of low ratings. A film production deal with Disney, signed in 2002, ran until 2007.

  In 2003, Affleck's relationship with Jennifer Lopez drew intense media attention. By the end of that year, GQ had called him the "world's most over-exposed actor." Daredevil, released that year, starred him as the blind superhero. He had loved the character as a comic book fan and had written a foreword about it in 1999 for Smith's Guardian Devil. The film made money but divided critics, and in 2014 Affleck named it the only film he regretted making. Gigli, co-starring Lopez, was almost uniformly panned. Affleck has repeatedly defended its director, Martin Brest, as "one of the really great directors." Paycheck, Jersey Girl and Surviving Christmas followed, to poor reviews.

  By then, the scripts offered to Affleck were "just getting worse and worse." The negative press "really started to affect" him, and he decided to take a career break. In late 2004 the Los Angeles Times published a piece on the downfall of his career. It noted that, unlike critics and tabloid writers, "few industry professionals seem to be gloating over Affleck's travails." The comeback began in 2006.

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• 5. Director's Chair

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  George Reeves, the actor who played Superman on television, was the role that restarted Affleck's career in the 2006 noir biopic Hollywoodland. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it work from "an actor some of us had prematurely written off." Affleck won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival and earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

  Gone Baby Gone, released in 2007, was his first film as a director. It was a crime drama set in a working-class Boston neighborhood, with his brother Casey as a private investigator searching for an abducted child. Affleck co-wrote the script with childhood friend Aaron Stockard, adapting a book by Dennis Lehane. He had first mentioned his plan to adapt the story in 2003. Reviews were enthusiastic. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times praised its "sensitivity to real struggle."

  Warner Bros. developed a close working relationship with Affleck after that debut, and it offered him his choice of the studio's scripts. He chose The Town, released in 2010, an adaptation of Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves. He rewrote the screenplay and starred as a bank robber. It was a surprise box office hit. Roger Ebert wrote that "Affleck has the stuff of a real director." Pearl Street Films also signed a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros. in 2010.

  Argo, released in 2012, was written by Chris Terrio and starred Affleck as a CIA operative. It tells of the CIA plan to rescue six U.S. diplomats during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by faking the production of a large science fiction film. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker called it "further proof that we were wrong about Ben Affleck." The film won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for Best Picture, and its cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award.

  David Fincher cast Affleck in the psychological thriller Gone Girl in 2014, and Affleck pushed back his own directing project to do it. Fincher chose him partly because he knew what it was to be misrepresented by tabloid media. The director said Affleck is "crazy smart" but downplays it, adding: "I think he learned how to skate on charm." In 2015, HBO revived Project Greenlight for a single season.

  Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice arrived in 2016 with Affleck as the caped hero. Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times called the casting "a somewhat bewildering choice." Affleck returned briefly as Batman in Suicide Squad that year and played the part in the DC Extended Universe from 2016 to 2023. In 2016 he also starred as an autistic accountant in The Accountant, an unexpected commercial success. Live by Night, a Prohibition-era gangster drama that he wrote, directed, co-produced and starred in, did not fare as well. It failed to recoup its $65 million budget. David Sims of The Atlantic called it "a fascinating mess of a movie," yet noted that one action scene showed how much skill Affleck has with a camera.

  Justice League reached theaters in 2017, and Affleck later described the shoot as "difficult." Zack Snyder stepped down during filming after the death of his daughter. His replacement, Joss Whedon, drew complaints about his treatment of actors. In 2021 Snyder's director's cut of the film included a newly filmed scene with Affleck.

  Peter II, Count of Alençon, was a hedonistic aristocrat in Ridley Scott's 2021 medieval drama The Last Duel, and Affleck played him. He also co-wrote that film's screenplay with Damon and Nicole Holofcener. Later in 2021 he appeared as a substitute father figure in The Tender Bar. George Clooney, who directed it, said he cast Affleck because he is "very intelligent, and he can also come off as the big goomba." The role earned Affleck Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

  Air, his fifth film as director, premiered in 2023 and told how Nike created the Air Jordan. Damon and Viola Davis starred, and Affleck played Phil Knight in a supporting role. It was the first release from Artists Equity, the independent production company that Affleck and Damon co-own and that aims to share profits with all stakeholders. Affleck is its chief executive and intends to work exclusively for it as a filmmaker. David Sims called the film "a great return to Affleck's original impulses as a director." That same year he starred as a detective in Hypnotic and made a cameo as Batman in The Flash.

  The Accountant 2 arrived in 2025, and in January 2026 Affleck and Damon starred together in the crime thriller The Rip. Affleck also directed and starred in Animals, a kidnapping thriller with Gillian Anderson, which is headed for Netflix on a date that has not been announced. In March 2026, Netflix acquired his post-production startup InterPositive, which focuses on artificial intelligence, for an estimated $600 million. Affleck joined Netflix as a senior advisor to oversee how the technology is integrated.

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• 6. Causes and Campaigns

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  Between 2007 and early 2010, Affleck traveled repeatedly in eastern Congo. In 2010 he and Whitney Williams founded the Eastern Congo Initiative, a nonprofit grant maker for Congolese-led, community-based charities. It offers training and resources to cooperatives of Congolese farmers and works with companies including Theo Chocolate and Starbucks. It also tries to raise public awareness and push for policy change in the United States.

  Op-eds by Affleck on the region have run in the Washington Post, Politico, the Huffington Post, Time, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In Washington he has testified before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health and Human Rights, the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Senate appropriations subcommittee.

  Joe Kindregan was ten years old when Affleck met him in 1998, during the filming of Forces of Nature. Joe lived with the rare disease ataxia-telangiectasia, known as A-T, and the two became friends. Affleck took up fundraising for the A-T Children's Project. In 2001 he and Joe testified before a House appropriations subcommittee, asking for support for stem-cell research and a doubling of the National Institutes of Health budget. In 2007 Affleck gave the keynote speech at Joe's high school graduation in Fairfax, Virginia. Joe appeared as an extra in Argo. In 2013, to mark Joe's 25th birthday, Affleck and Jennifer Garner matched donations to the A-T Children's Project. Joe Kindregan died in 2015.

  Feeding America's Entertainment Council counts Affleck as a member. He visited the Greater Boston Food Bank in 2007 and a Denver food bank in 2008. In 2011 he and Ellen DeGeneres launched the charity's Small Change Campaign. During the COVID-19 pandemic he organized an online celebrity poker tournament for it. He has also filmed public service announcements for Paralyzed Veterans of America in 2009 and 2014, and he has volunteered for Midnight Mission in Los Angeles.

  Affleck calls himself "moderately liberal" and says he was raised in a strong union household. In 2000 he spoke at a Harvard rally for a higher living wage for all campus workers. In 2004 he held a press conference on Capitol Hill with Senator Ted Kennedy to push for a higher minimum wage.

  He registered as a Democrat in 1992. He campaigned for Al Gore in the last weeks of the 2000 election but could not vote because of a registration problem in New York City. He joked, "I'm going to vote twice next time, in true Boston fashion." In 2004 he spoke to delegations at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and traveled with John Kerry on the opening weekend of his Believe in America Tour. He hosted two fundraisers for Barack Obama during the 2008 primary. In the week of that election, he appeared on Saturday Night Live to jokingly endorse John McCain.

  Affleck first met Hillary Clinton at Camp David in 1998. During her 2016 campaign, he recorded a New Hampshire voter public service announcement. The campaign named him a "Hillblazer," one of 1,100 people who had given or raised at least $100,000. OpenSecrets reported that he raised $149,028.

  In 2005, The Washington Post reported that Virginia Democrats were trying to persuade him to run for the Senate, and his publicist dismissed it. Since 2007 he has denied any political ambitions. When Massachusetts Senate rumors surfaced in 2012, he denied them too, joking that he "also won't be throwing my hat in the ring to run the UN."

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• 7. Marriages and Media

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  October 1997 is when Affleck began dating Gwyneth Paltrow, after they met at a Miramax dinner. They worked together on Shakespeare in Love, split in January 1999, and resumed after she persuaded him to co-star in Bounce. They separated again in October 2000. Before Paltrow, he had been with Cheyenne Rothman from 1990 to 1997.

  Jennifer Lopez and Affleck became friends on the set of Gigli in December 2001. Their romance began in July 2002, when Lopez filed for divorce from her second husband, Cris Judd. Tabloids dubbed the couple "Bennifer," the first celebrity portmanteau of its kind. They appeared together in the video for her song "Jenny from the Block" and in Jersey Girl. They became engaged in November 2002. Their wedding, planned for the 14th of September 2003, was postponed with four days' notice because of "excessive media attention." They called off the engagement in January 2004.

  Lopez later called the relationship her "first real heartbreak," and said Affleck's discomfort with the scrutiny was one reason they split. Affleck argued that some media commentary was rooted in racism, classism and sexism. He also admitted he had contributed to the attention. He said: "I think Jen and I made a mistake in that we fell in love, we were excited and maybe too accessible."

  Jennifer Garner and Affleck had become friends on the sets of Pearl Harbor and Daredevil, and they began dating in August 2004. They married on the 29th of June 2005 in a private ceremony in the Turks and Caicos. Victor Garber officiated, and he and his partner, Rainer Andreesen, were the only guests. The couple had three children. They announced their separation in June 2015 and jointly filed for divorce in April 2017. It was finalized in October 2018. In 2020 Affleck called the divorce "the biggest regret of my life."

  In 2013 Affleck and Garner hosted lawmakers at their home to support a bill protecting celebrities' children from harassment by photographers. Their six-year-old daughter made a speech about her own experiences. Garner testified before the California Assembly Judiciary Committee, and the bill became law. Photographers still regularly waited outside the children's school. In December 2009, a stalker of Garner named Steven Burky was arrested while trying to blend in with paparazzi outside their daughter's preschool. In March 2010 he was ruled insane and sent to a California state mental hospital.

  Lindsay Shookus, a New York television producer, dated Affleck over a long distance from mid-2017 to mid-2018. He met the Cuban actress Ana de Armas on the set of Deep Water in the fall of 2019, and they dated from early 2020 to early 2021. Lopez and Affleck began dating again in April 2021-20 years after they first met. They became engaged in April 2022 and married in a Las Vegas ceremony on the 16th of July 2022. They separated in April 2024, and Lopez filed for divorce that August. The divorce was finalized in February 2025. Affleck said it involved "no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue."

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• 8. Reckonings and Recovery

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  In 2017, during the MeToo movement, two women accused Affleck of inappropriate behavior. The actress Hilarie Burton said that during a 2003 appearance on TRL Uncensored, he touched her chest on air. Affleck wrote on Twitter: "I acted inappropriately toward Ms. Burton and I sincerely apologize." Annamarie Tendler, a makeup artist, said he grabbed her at a Golden Globes party in 2014.

  When allegations against Harvey Weinstein emerged, Affleck pledged to donate any future profits from his early Miramax films to charities supporting victims of sexual assault. The actress Rose McGowan challenged his statement that he had known only that Weinstein "was sleazy and a bully." She said she met Affleck after an assault at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and told him about it. In a leaked email, Affleck denied that she had told him she was attacked. In a 2019 interview he said: "I believe Rose. I support her." In 2020, McGowan said she was not raging at him and had never told him she was raped. She said her point was about how many people knew about Weinstein.

  Affleck has both anxiety and depression, and he has taken antidepressants since he was 26. He became sober in his mid-twenties and said in a 1998 interview that alcohol was "dangerous" for him. In 2001 he received residential treatment for addiction and stayed sober for a "couple of years." After that he stopped discussing the issue in interviews and later said he "drank relatively normally" for about eight years. Over time he drank more and more, until he was passing out on a nightly basis. Garner supported him through the struggle, and said in 2020 that Al-Anon meetings helped her change "the dance" of their relationship.

  In 2017 Affleck went to residential treatment and then did not work for the rest of the year. He stepped down as director, writer and star of The Batman, saying he "couldn't crack it" and no longer felt "passionate" about the story. Production of Triple Frontier was postponed by six months to accommodate his treatment. After a publicly documented relapse and an intervention, he returned to treatment in 2018. He completed further outpatient treatment over the following year. In late 2019, TMZ filmed him stumbling on a Los Angeles street. He acknowledged the next day that he had a brief "slip" after more than a year of sobriety.

  The Way Back, released in 2020, cast Affleck as a recovering alcoholic, and the film was shot in the days after he left rehab. He had relapsed during pre-production in 2018. He agreed to put his salary in escrow, and a sober coach accompanied him to the set. Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair wrote that Affleck handled the "meta angle" with humility, and David Sims of The Atlantic called it "the rawest and most natural" work of his career. He received a Best Actor nomination at the 2021 Critics' Choice Awards.

  Affleck said he felt "vulnerable" talking about his addiction and did not plan to talk about it forever. The value of speaking, he said, is showing that recovery "doesn't have to be the label on your head." By 2023 he said he often tells fellow actors to avoid speaking publicly about their addiction where possible: "You don't need to be anybody's poster child."

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