Ben Affleck For GQ Magazine

Alright, take a look to your right on my blog! If you scroll down just a little, you’ll find my interview with Ben Affleck here in Atlanta for his 2020 movie The Way Back. I absolutely loved the film and became a huge fan of Ben and the entire cast! So seeing him on the cover of GQ feels totally surreal, and honestly, he can do no wrong in my eyes. I even brought him cookies on set, haha! In his GQ interview, he opens up about life’s setbacks, his family, his dad’s dream of becoming a director, and so much more. Take a peek inside for a few highlights!

I was reflecting on the fact that you are maybe not thought of as a very personal actor, but that there is a lot of your life in roles you’ve taken, whether Good Will Hunting, which has some of your dad in it, or Hollywoodland and Gone Girl, which are kind of about fame and reckoning with the spotlight, or more recently, The Way Back, in which you played an alcoholic.

A lot of those later on became evident, maybe more evident. And I knew with The Way Back, like, “Okay, look, people know I’m an alcoholic or in recovery, I’m going to have to have a conversation about this.” I didn’t really mind that. I maybe underestimated the degree to which—I didn’t have any ambitions to be the national spokesman for recovering alcoholics. And not because I have any shame with it or anything. I just find that, I’ve been sober for more than five years, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind. It’s not the central preoccupation of my life. But at the time, it was something that I was definitely wrestling with and thinking about. And also I was totally aware that my own lived experience meant that I was able to bring something to it that I thought would make it feel more real and connect with people more. Now, I hadn’t lost a child, thank God, which is what really was at the core of that story, which I can’t imagine anything worse than that in life. So it is both. It is a combination. You bring some things to it and you have to imagine others.

If I could have, I would’ve kept the fact that I’m sober anonymous, because I think it works better that way. And I didn’t ask for that to become something people knew about. But I can’t complain about it either. I understood doing this job and doing this life, if something happened like that, people were going to know about it, and they did. And I have arrived at a place where I think of that experience as part of my life in authentically grateful ways, whereas I didn’t think such a thing was possible before. So that sort of is what it is.

You’re 52. When you do a movie like The Accountant 2 now, are you like, “I only have so many more action movies left in me”?

Physically? Yes, definitely. I used to be very gung ho about like, “Oh, I’ll do the fights, I’ll do the stunts.” And now I am very much, “At what point is the stunt performer going to come in and do this?” Part of it’s because I know they’re just better at it than I am, and you want somebody who looks good doing it. From a totally selfish perspective, you just get banged up and tired. It’s one of the things I was talking to Matt about—he’s going off to do this Chris Nolan movie and doing a lot of stunt rehearsal, and it was kind of like, Boy, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Where you really have to go learn the fights—this is Bourne Identity kind of territory.

This is referring to AI? You are seemingly one of the few people in the industry to be like: “I’m open to the idea.”

No, actually—when I talk about AI, I’m really talking in broad terms about what we need to do as an industry. I myself am not personally doing AI, obviously, but I am really looking very closely at what this is going to mean for this business and this art form. The first time I saw it, I felt terrified. I thought: We’re going to be destroyed. What we do is clearly just being duplicated here and, oh my gosh, we spend all this energy and time and commitment and going out and filming stories and trying to bring them to life, and here the computer can sort of do this with a keystroke. And what I learned is you actually really can’t do that with a keystroke. And, in fact, what we do is probably more resistant to disintermediation by AI than most other businesses, frankly, and most other jobs. But also that it actually should be a useful tool. Part of my eagerness around it is because I really would like to participate in defining, for example, the residual streams that I know are going to accompany this. If they’re not defined now, it’ll be much harder to do it.

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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Gregory Harris
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Teddy Charles at Nevermind Agency
Skin by Jo Strettell using Sisley Paris
Tailoring by Susie & Hasmik Kourinian
Set design by Stefan Beckman at Exposure NY
Produced by Camp Productions

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