Just six months after the Academy Awards, he baffled the industry — and lost a lot of goodwill — when it was announced that he had signed on to play Batman in Zack Snyder's Warner Bros. comic book adaptation Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Here was a guy who had been given in a second chance, and this was what he wanted to do with it? Did he need money that badly?
That film came out in 2016 and had the eighth-biggest opening weekend on record — but also registered at just 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. He reprised the character in Suicide Squad (2016), which received even worse reviews, and in Justice League (2017), Todd McCarthy's THR review of which noted that Affleck "looks like he'd rather be almost anywhere else."
Around the same time, Affleck's biggest-budgeted directorial effort, 2016's Live by Night, bombed. His marriage to actress Jennifer Garner, with whom he has three children, came to an end. And, he acknowledges, "I realized I was an alcoholic."
How does he look back at that time now?
"I did Batman because I wanted to do it for my kids," explains Affleck, who has agreed to don the Batsuit one more time in The Flash, which is due out in 2022. "I wanted to do something that my son would dig. I mean, my kids didn't see Argo." He continues, "Zack [Snyder] wanted to do a version of the Frank Miller Dark Knight graphic novel series, which is a really good version of that. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons why things go the way they do in the movie business, and just because your face is on the poster doesn't mean that you're dictating all of those things — and even if you were, that they would go well." He adds, "I wore the suit to my son's birthday party, which was worth every moment of suffering on Justice League."
Affleck continues, "I started drinking too much around the time of Justice League, and it's a hard thing to confront and face and deal with. I've been sober for a while now, and I feel really good — as healthy and good as I've ever felt. And the process of recovering from alcoholism has been really instructive. I think it's great for people who aren't alcoholics, you know? Like, 'Be honest. Have integrity. Take accountability. Help other people.' It's a good set of things that they teach you. It took me a little while to get it — I had a few slips, like most people — but I feel really good." He adds, "If you knew how many actors and directors and writers were alcoholics or compulsive in some way — I mean, it's the most ordinary thing in the world in Hollywood. I've worked with actors who showed up drunk! And that was not me. I drank, like, alone in my living room and just passed out, like, with scotch. But I got sober."
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