For some actors, landing a marquee superhero role is a career-capping honor. For others—including most of Hollywood’s Batmen over the years, including Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, and Robert Pattinson—it’s an interesting and entertaining, but not defining, part of their filmography. For a few, or maybe just one performer in particular, it’s something to be looked back upon with despair and loathing. That performer being, of course, Ben Affleck.
Affleck’s unhappiness during his “Batfleck” period was well-documented and became prolific meme fodder. He first took on the mantle for 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and also played the character in both versions of Justice League. His last time as Batman came with a cameo in 2023’s The Flash. And with DC’s leadership now in new hands, and at least one new Batman now established in Robert Pattinson, it seems Affleck is free forever from any future returns.
In a new interview with GQ, it sounds like he’s found creative fulfillment in both producing and directing more than acting lately, though he does have The Accountant 2 opening soon. One reason seems to be his less-than-happy state of mind while he was on the Justice League set.
“There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever,” he told the magazine. “I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
Also, he realized along the way that things had perhaps gotten overly dark for Batman and the rest of the DC Extended Universe. “It started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem,’” he recalled. “Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”
It wasn’t time completely wasted, however. “I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two,” Affleck said. “In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.”
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