Affleck On His Batman Role: ‘Excruciating’

Ben Affleck first took on the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman in 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” directed by filmmaker Zack Snyder.

The actor ended up staying in the role across several films, including Snyder’s “Justice League,” a short appearance in “The Flash,” and a cameo in David Ayer’s “Suicide Squad”.

He also famously was going to do a solo film which he was planning to direct, but that all fell apart and then along came Matt Reeves with a new standalone take on Batman that saw Robert Pattinson take over the role. After that came a regime change with James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Universe wiping away the DCEU set up by Snyder’s “Man of Steel”.

Affleck recently sat down with GQ and reflected on his time as Batman, saying he’s done with the superhero genre and how it wasn’t a good experience for him:

“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.

I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just because I’ve lost interest in what was of interest to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that.”

So why was it so bad for him? Affleck explains that it all came down to expectation, and his own personal issues impacting his job performance:

“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.

I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge. But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So, I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”

He says the problems went Beyond just him, adding that there were issues with the films overall and their darker and more adult tone than many works in the genre:

“What happened was 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 s—, we have a problem’.

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.”

Affleck is now focusing on his production company, Artists Equity, where he aims to avoid a repeat of the situation in future projects.

The post Affleck On His Batman Role: ‘Excruciating’ appeared first on Dark Horizons.