No one gives an interview quite like Ben Affleck. When it comes to discussing his personal life with the press, Affleck will just let you know what’s going on, even where his peers might offer a canned publicist-generated answer. He’s on the cover of GQ this month promoting The Accountant 2 and, of course, was asked about his divorce from Jennifer Lopez. Obviously, he nailed it.
“My life is actually pretty drama-free,” Affleck told the magazine, before bringing up the divorce himself. “I’m sure in your mind you’re thinking, Oh, well, you just got divorced. That’s not drama-free. And I understand that instinct, but all of this is pretty adult, and for all the sensational stuff that gets written, if somebody sat down and talked to me about it, and I said, ‘Well, this is really the experience,’ their eyes would glaze over with boredom.”
I think he’s kind of underestimating how interested a lot of us would be in the nitty-gritty details of how Bennifer 2.0 ended, but sure. Affleck went on to discuss his prominent part in the documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, which came out shortly after Lopez released her This Is Me… Now project. In the doc, you can see how he and Lopez had different attitudes about how public their relationship should be.
“I thought it was an interesting examination. There are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them,” Affleck explained. “My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers. As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude toward these things.” While Affleck says they had different approaches to fame, it “wasn’t the cause of some major fracture.”
In a follow-up interview, Affleck clarified that, in case it wasn’t apparent, he has nothing bad to say about Lopez. “I have nothing but respect,” Affleck said. “I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something. But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting.” He went on to say that there was “no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue” involved in the end of their marriage. According to him, “It sounds more like a couples-therapy session, which — you would tune out of someone else’s couples therapy after a while.” (Dr. Orna would disagree.)
“You start going, ‘Okay, clearly this person has got these issues,” he went on. “And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable,” Affleck said. That’s okay, Ben, you’ve shared enough. We can wait to get the rest of the details in 20 years when J.Lo decides to release The Greatest Memoir Never Written.
