Former Batman Ben Affleck is promoting his new movie, The Way Back, about a former basketball star who overcomes alcoholism to lead his former team to success as a coach.
Affleck is also this particular moment to get candid about his often messy personal life. In a new interview with the New York Times, Affleck opens up about his struggles with alcoholism and his divorce from actress Jennifer Garner.
“People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they’re trying to make go away. 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.”
In the interview, Affleck explains that his drinking was a major factor in his split from Garner.
“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 looks on his divorce with a fair amount of regret.
“The biggest regret of my life is this divorce. 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.”
Affleck explains in the interview that he is prone to obsessive thinking and that dwelling on past regrets isn’t helpful to his mental health.
“It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up. 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.”
Also not good for Affleck’s mental health? Playing Batman. While he initially planned on donning the cowl again in The Batman, he dropped out for personal reasons.
“I showed somebody The Batman script. They said, ‘I think the script is good. I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went through again.’”
Affleck also cleared up some rumors about his massive back tattoo, which he initially called fake when it was photographed by paps before revealing that it was indeed real.
“I resented that somebody got a picture of it by spying on me. It felt invasive. … I could have said, ‘That’s none of your business.’ I guess I got a kick out of messing with Extra. Is your tattoo real or not real? Of course, it’s real! No, I put a fake tattoo on my back and then hid it.”
