Hollywood’s Ben Affleck on battling addiction, his painful divorce

Affleck, Oscar-winning writer, director of the Oscar-winning ‘Argo’, better actor than you remember — and, yes, alcoholic, divorce 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 UAE theatres March 5. 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 behaviour, 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.”

CAUGHT IN A CYCLE

He cleared his throat. “I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”

Affleck’s marriage to Jennifer Garner, with whom he has three children, ended in 2018 after a long separation. He said he still felt guilt but had moved past shame. “The biggest regret of my life is this divorce,” he continued, noticeably using the present tense. “Shame is really toxic. There is no positive byproduct of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”

He took a sharp breath and exhaled slowly, as if to slow himself down. “It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up,” he said. “I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”

‘The Way Back’ was originally called ‘The Has-Been’. That downer of a title was dropped during development as the film became less focused on what a basketball talent the main character had been in high school, Affleck said. Suffice it to say, no star wants to appear on a poster next to the words ‘The Has-Been’,” especially not after two box office disappointments. ‘Justice League’ (2017) took in $658 million, a puny sum by superhero standards, and ‘Live by Night’ (2016), a period gangster drama that he also directed, flatlined with $23 million.

CAREER TRACK

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. Moviegoers, women in particular, will ultimately decide: Is forgiveness for transgressions still something that society in all of its Twitter-fied polarisation allows? To some, Affleck is still the guy who broke Garner’s heart and who was accused of groping a talk-show host in 2003. “I acted inappropriately,” he said of that incident in 2017, as the #MeToo era dawned, “and I sincerely apologise.”

Hollywood has certainly granted Affleck clemency. He just finished acting in ‘Deep Water’, a psychological thriller co-starring Ana de Armas (‘Knives Out’) that’s due in theatres in November. He’s on Netflix this month in ‘The Last Thing He Wanted’, an abysmally reviewed mystery anchored by Anne Hathaway and directed by Dee Rees. Affleck has also been working with the Oscar-nominated Nicole Holofcener (‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’) and Damon on the script for ‘The Last Duel’, which begins filming in France this month. Set in the 14th century, ‘The Last Duel’ re-teams Affleck and Damon as screenwriters for the first time since “Good Will Hunting” in 1997; Ridley Scott is directing the film, which has Oscar bait written all over it. Disney plans to release ‘The Last Duel’ in theatres at Christmas through its 20th Century label.

Affleck is also zeroing in on another directing project for himself. It probably won’t be that previously announced remake of the 1957 drama “Witness for the Prosecution,” he said. Instead, he wants to tackle ‘King Leopold’s Ghost’, an epic about the colonial plundering of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo; Martin Scorsese has signed on as a producer. (Affleck co-founded the Eastern Congo Initiative, a nonprofit advocacy group, in 2010.)
He has not talked much about his alcoholism since completing a third stint in rehab in 2018. (The first two were in 2001 and 2017.)

But the arrival of ‘The Way Back’ has made the subject impossible to avoid. Affleck has also accepted that the second word in Alcoholics Anonymous does not apply to him — certainly not after he (briefly) relapsed in the fall, turning up smashed on TMZ a few months after making it known that he had achieved one year of continuous sobriety.
“Relapse is embarrassing, obviously,” he said. “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.”

EARLY YEARS

Growing up in Massachusetts, Affleck saw his own father drunk almost every day, he said. “My dad didn’t really get sober until I was 19,” Affleck said, becoming guarded all of a sudden. (It was one of only two times when he chose each word carefully, with the other being his answer to a question about Harvey Weinstein’s trial on charges of rape and sexual assault.

Early in his career, Affleck starred in multiple movies that were backed by Weinstein’s companies. “I don’t know that I have anything to really add or say that hasn’t been said already and better by people who have been personally victimised or who are survivors of what he did,” Affleck said. Three years ago, Affleck announced that he would donate all future residual payments from Weinstein films to anti-sexual assault charities.)

“The older I’ve gotten, the more I recognise that my dad did the best he could,” Affleck said. “There’s a lot of alcoholism and mental illness in my family. The legacy of that is quite powerful and sometimes hard to shake.” Affleck’s younger brother, Casey, 44, has spoken about his own alcoholism and sobriety. Their paternal grandmother took her own life in a motel when she was 46. An uncle killed himself with a shotgun. An aunt was a heroin addict.
“It took me a long time to fundamentally, deeply, without a hint of doubt, admit to myself that I am an alcoholic,” Ben Affleck said. “The next drink will not be different.”

It seemed like a good moment to point out how many stars had started to speak out about getting sober — Brad Pitt most notably — and how that was lessening the stigma of addiction and, perhaps, inspiring people with substance problems to seek help. Jamie Lee Curtis, sober for two decades, appeared on the cover of Variety’s “recovery” issue in November. Discussing their sobriety in recent books and interviews have been Demi Lovato, Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Simpson, Demi Moore and, of course, Elton John, who has sponsored Eminem.

Affleck cited the sober A-listers Bradley Cooper and Robert Downey Jr. as “guys who have been very supportive and to whom I feel a great sense of gratitude.” Affleck continued. “One of the things about recovery that I think people sometimes overlook is the fact that it inculcates certain values. Be honest. Be accountable. Help other people. Apologise when you’re wrong.”

FILM FOCUS

‘The Way Back’ was directed by Gavin O’Connor (‘The Accountant’, also starring Affleck and a surprise hit) from a script by O’Connor and Brad Ingelsby (‘Out of the Furnace’). It cost Warner Bros. and Bron Studios about $25 million to make and was primarily shot in San Pedro, a working-class area of Los Angeles.

“I think that Ben, in an artistic way, in a deeply human way, wanted to confront his own issues through this character and heal,” O’Connor said by phone.

Jack Cunningham (Affleck) is a construction worker coping with devastating personal loss. His home away from home is a lowlife bar, the kind of place you can smell before you go in. Sometimes he holes up in his apartment to down cases of beer. He starts each morning by drinking in the shower, the can balanced on a sad soap caddy.

Without knowing the extent of his alcoholism, the principal at Jack’s alma mater asks him to coach the boys basketball team, which has even less self-esteem than he does. Melvin Gregg (‘American Vandal’) stars as a player with off-court troubles.

“The hardest part of the movie for Ben was really the basketball,” O’Connor said. “If you’ve never really played before, being on a court is like, you know, being on ice skates for the first time. Once that part clicked, we were cooking with gasoline. He was already ready to go to really deep, dark places with the drinking.”

Toward the end of ‘The Way Back’ (spoiler alert) Jack has a powerful interaction with his ex-wife (Janina Gavankar, ‘The Morning Show’). He is in rehab at this point, and, when she comes to see how he is doing, he offers her an unflinching apology.

“I failed you,” he says. “I failed our marriage.”

It’s rough stuff, especially when watched through the prism of everything that has gone on with Affleck off-screen. You can’t help but think about similar conversations that he must have had with Garner.

“It was really important, without being mawkish or false, that he make amends to her — that he take accountability for the pain that he and only he has caused,” Affleck said.

O’Connor said that Affleck had a “total breakdown” on set after completing the scene.
“It was like a floodgate opened up,” O’Connor said. “It was startling and powerful. I think that was a very personal moment in the movie. I think that was him.”

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Don’t miss it!

The Way Back is out in UAE cinemas on March 5.