Ben Affleck on His 'Failings' in Batman Roles: 'A Lot of Unhappiness'

Ben Affleck is reflecting on why his stint as Batman wasn't ideal.

In 2016, he debuted as the titular superhero in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, later reprising the character in 2017's Justice League and 2023's The Flash—a role he previously told the Los Angeles Times was “the worst experience.”

In a new cover story with GQ, the Oscar winner opened up about the “number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience.”

“They don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever,” he explained. “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.”

He also revealed that some of his own shortcomings, at the time, could be seen in his portrayal of Batman.

“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," he said.

“I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge,” he continued. “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.”

Affleck said his production company, Artists Equity, aims to “avoid” some of the misalignment that occurred on the Batman set.

“I want to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cast and a studio apparatus that’s aligned, where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience," he explained.

Apart from the issues, the 52-year-old said he liked his approach to the superhero, which he described to GQ as a “sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne.”

However, director Zack Snyder and DC had differing views on how to characterize Batman.

“What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” Affleck said. “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.’ 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 gearing up for the release of The Accountant 2, the sequel to the 2016 action film.