Ben Affleck has opened up about what he didn’t enjoy about playing Batman, and why he won’t work in the superhero genre again.
The Oscar winner was cast as The Dark Knight as part of the DC Extended Universe between 2016 and 2023, appearing in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Justice League and The Flash. A solo film for his character was planned, but eventually scrapped in favour of 2022’s The Batman starring Robert Pattinson.
Speaking to GQ, Affleck looked back on his time in the role, expanding on previous statements that he didn’t enjoy playing him. “There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience,” he said. “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: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me”.
He continued: “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”.
The actor would later say the reason for his negative memories were partly personal. “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” he said. “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”.
When discussing what went wrong with the shared universe, which is being rebooted by James Gunn, Affleck said he felt the characters were becoming too adult. “What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” he explained. “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’”.
Recently, it was announced that one of Ben Affleck’s older films, comedy Dogma, was in the works, with the star and best friend Matt Damon expected to return.