A Friend Told Ben Affleck He’d 'Drink Himself to Death' If He Did ‘The Batman’

Evan Romano
·3 min read

From Men's Health

  • Ben Affleck finally revealed the circumstances that led to him dropping out of his role in The Batman and leaving the DC Extended Universe.

  • In an interview with The New York Times, he says that he showed someone the script for The Batman, and they advised him against it, thinking he would "drink [himself] to death."

  • Affleck, who played Batman in three films, was replaced in The Batman by Robert Pattinson.

After officially dropping the role of Batman last year and leaving the DC Extended Universe behind, Ben Affleck is finally revealing the events that led to his departure. In a new in-depth interview in The New York Times, Affleck said that the end of his marriage with Jennifer Garner led to increased drinking and a troubled time shooting Justice League—so troubled that a friend advised him against returning to the role for The Batman.

“I showed somebody The Batman script,” he said in the Times interview. “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 though again.”

Affleck, who played Batman in Batman v Superman, Justice League, and briefly in Suicide Squad, was originally set to both direct and star in The Batman, but the movie went through several delays, with Matt Reeves eventually taking over directing but Affleck still connected to star. It wasn't until last January, though, that the speculation finally came to an end and Affleck officially announced his departure from the film (and the franchise).

“I drank relatively normally for a long time," Affleck said. "What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart.”

The 47-year-old star of Argo and Good Will Hunting was married to Garner (his co-star in Daredevil) for 13 years; the pair have three children together. Affleck detailed a series of vices that he gave in to in order to feel better following the dissolution of his marriage, eventually realizing that it wasn't actually helping.

“You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever,” he said. “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.”

While Affleck won't appear in 2021's The Batman (that will instead star Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, and Paul Dano, among others), he does have a number of high profile films coming out in 2020, starting with March's basketball movie, The Way Back. He will also appear in Ridley Scott's The Last Duel and alongside Knives Out breakout star Ana de Armas in an "erotic thriller" called Deep Water later this year.

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