The life of Ben Affleck (Berkeley, California, 51 years old) over the last two decades has been a loop: he has a relationship with a woman named Jennifer, one of his films fails, a picture of him in a bad way becomes to a meme, wins an Oscar as an actor and someone compares his career to that of his friend Matt Damon and loses. None of these things happened just once, and nothing precludes them from happening again (because there’s still Jennifer Lawrence, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, and Jennifer Connelly out there waiting).
His career has spanned four decades, but everything in it seems to have passed far too quickly. In 1998, he was named the new Tom Cruise thanks to Armageddon, and four years later the Los Angeles Times asked him to take a break. His career has suffered a gradual decline, but not his popularity. We’ve heard a lot less about “Hypnotic,” the thriller that just came out directed by Robert Rodríguez, than we did about “Hypnotic.” the alleged discussion which he kept in a car with his wife Jennifer Lopez.
Ben Affleck’s story was an atypical one from the start. He might be considered a child prodigy since we’ve seen him on screen since he was seven, but other than die-hard fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, no one remembers him before Movida del 76 (1993), Richard Linklater’s generational comedy, in which he played a high school bully, a similar role to the one he next played in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995).
He concluded that he would be cast in the role of the bully until Smith gave him his first leading role in the indie romantic comedy Chasing Amy (1997), in which Affleck began a relationship with a lesbian woman. His character was sensitive, tender, ironic and, above all, handsome with a goatee. Hollywood, always worried about discovering a new lover, prepared to devour him. Before Chasing Amy hit theaters, he was sitting in Armageddon director Michael Bay’s office listening to the path he should take to become an action hero.
As producer Jennifer Klein admitted, they told her: “You have to go to the gym, get a tan and get a haircut.” Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t like his teeth: “He has baby teeth. “I fixed Tom Cruise’s teeth and I’m going to fix them too.” Every now and then the industry targets a comedy actor and turns him into muscle. Sometimes it goes well (Chris Pratt), sometimes it’s weird (John Krasinski), and sometimes it’s something you’d rather never see (Kumail Nanjiani). Affleck gracefully stood up to Bruce Willis, and his chemistry with Liv Tyler and especially Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” made us forget the awkward Cookie sequence that made us wish that Texas-sized asteroid was about to land as soon as possible. previously.
A very young Ben Affleck with Pam Potillo in a Disney series in 1986. ABC Photo Archives (Disney General Entertainment Con)
Importantly, more than $500 million was raised and everyone noticed how handsome Affleck looked in a shirt. A star was born and he was intelligent too. He and his childhood friend Matt Damon had sold a screenplay they had been working on for years for $600,000: Will Hunting, which in 1997 was the Academy’s second-most nominated film after Titanic with nine nominations.
Unable to pay rent, Affleck was now earning $12 million per film. He dated Gwyneth Paltrow and people voted him the sexiest man of 2002. The world was his oyster. How do you explain that just a few years later the Los Angeles Times wrote an article talking about her “fall”? The answer is a word that combines two names: Bennifer.
The Bennifer case
After breaking up with Paltrow, he began dating actress, singer, dancer, businesswoman and full-time diva Jennifer Lopez, and in the style of great couples (Burton and Taylor, Hepburn and Tracy, Bacall and Bogart) they began a film project. Affleck, who had already demonstrated his de-lesbianizing power in “Chasing Amy,” repeated it again in “A Dangerous Relationship” (Gigli), the story of a small-time criminal who falls in love with a lesbian assassin, as was the case earlier in “The Fictionally, homosexuals who were homosexual until relatively recently eventually followed the straight path and became heterosexual.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, stars, heartthrobs and screenwriters. Ron Galella, Ltd. (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
The film had almost negligible box office success and catastrophic reviews. “As the Schadenfreudian thrill of watching beautiful people degrade themselves wears off, so does our will to live,” wrote Jeff Giles in Newsweek. Would the same thing have happened if the female lead had been the planned Halle Berry? Is it such a disastrous film? The truth is that it is no worse than most of Jennifer Lopez’s films. His failure had more to do with the fatigue that the public was beginning to sense. People didn’t like the couple, let alone their ubiquity. And while social media didn’t exist, the tabloids made it their daily menu. “And who fed them?” asked an anonymous manager in the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t blame the tabloids, because when you buy your girlfriend a six-carat diamond ring and drive to premieres in a white Bentley like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, you’re giving them what they want.”
“This type of reporting robs movie stars of their mystique,” complained Harvey Weinstein, a great friend of Affleck’s at the time. “The great lesson that Paul Newman and Robert Redford taught me is that you have to go out, promote your movie, and then run and hide,” in a blushing move that, if handled well, could have been ironic and would have added a layer of whitewash to a relationship that was beginning to turn into a stomach-churning affair, they captured their story in the video clip “Jenny from the Block,” something the actor would regret doing years later.
If Affleck’s physical attractiveness had made him the most promising of the two friends who would dominate Hollywood, the betting houses soon shifted their chips to Damon, who triumphed as the dark and fascinating protagonist in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) as the heroic Jason Bourne . Nothing worked for Affleck. “Pearl Harbor” (2000) was born as the “Titanic” of the skies, but despite its good box office results, it failed to warm the hearts of viewers. He also didn’t attract any enthusiasm as the new Jack Ryan in Nuclear Panic (2002) after Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford. Affleck and Lopez got engaged, but the wedding was postponed due to “excessive media attention,” which, according to a PR/Spanish translator, means the singer wasn’t very happy about Affleck’s visit to a club. striptease
Another Jennifer
But Hollywood always gives a good-looking man a second (or twelfth) chance. His role as George Reeves, the first Superman, in Hollywoodland (2006) won him the Volpi Cup in Venice. He opted for smaller projects and stepped behind the camera to show that his screenwriting distinction was no accident. Goodbye, Little Girl, Goodbye (2007) and The Town (2010) earned him the respect of studios, and Argo (2012) confirmed him as a director: he won three Oscars out of nine nominations, although none were nominally for him.
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in 2021 in New York.Gotham (GC Images)
His new life included a new partner, Jennifer Garner, with whom he had worked at Pearl Harbor. In 2005, Victor Garber, Garner’s father in Alias, married her. The media presence of the new Bennifers did not reach the level of the first, but they had an eventful end: after a decade and three children together, they separated in 2015. If the reason the first time was a striptease club, now it was another cliché : the babysitter. The divorce coincided with the filming of Batman and Superman: Dawn of Justice. His casting as Batman was not well received by fans, who started a Change.org petition signed by 100,000 angry fans asking him to abandon the project.
“I wore the suit to my son’s birthday party, it was worth every moment of suffering in Justice League,” he explained years later. And what kind of “suffering” was that? “I started drinking too much at that time and it’s hard to cope with it, deal with it and deal with it,” he explained. “I’ve been sober for a while and I feel healthier than ever.”
He admitted to Howard Stern that problems in his marriage influenced his descent into hell. “I couldn’t go because of my children, but I wasn’t happy, what should I do? I drank a bottle of whiskey and fell asleep on the couch, but that didn’t prove to be a solution.”
It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him. In 2001, he was admitted to the Promises Rehabilitation Center in Malibu to receive treatment for alcoholism. Affleck has never hidden his struggles with depression and addiction. A reality that I knew very well. His father is an alcoholic and he remembers seeing him drinking every day and feeling “relieved” when his parents divorced when he was 11.
Affleck is sad
While Affleck dealt with his demons and his Batman’s none-too-enthusiastic reception, the world, or rather the world with an internet connection and plenty of free time, was shocked by the sad Affleck meme. During a promotional interview for the film alongside Henry Cavill, he had maintained a distant expression for a few seconds, and the networks didn’t need any more. A YouTuber gave him “The Sounds of Silence” as his soundtrack and the video went viral.
He was not the first actor to be reduced to a meme or even a symbol of sadness: it had already happened with Keanu Reeves, but if with Reeves there was a certain tenderness, with Affleck there was always a touch of mockery. In his highly scrutinized relationship with Ana de Armas, some saw a courtship move, although it could also be pure coincidence that a foreign actress falls in love with her film partner every time she arrives in Hollywood and meets all the paparazzi every day are registered in California.
Occasionally, the actor used the madness of the networks to his own advantage. His appearance in David Fincher’s “Gone Girl” (2014) was scrutinized not for his acting skills, but for his penis, which was seen so briefly in the shot that Vulture created a guide on how to spot it on screen who also recommended the use of binoculars. To demonstrate that he was fine, Affleck himself increased interest in the event by telling MTV that the penis, although short, was actually there. “It’s an IMAX penis! You have to pay fifteen dollars to see it in 3D… It’s better in 3D.”
A script twist worthy of Gone Girl was the one that gave us the original Bennifer in 2021: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez reconciled and married 17 years after their split, and it became the tabloids’ favorite topic once again and a plethora of new ones Memes. The sad Affleck was overshadowed by the exhausted Affleck due to López’s supposed fiery nature. If social media is anything to go by, Ben Affleck still matters; If we go by the box office results, his films don’t seem to be that convincing. In 2023, it’s easier to remember your latest meme than the title of your last premiere. It’s hypnotic. You’re welcome.
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