Ben Affleck on fame, the Jennifer Lopez divorce and where he stands with Jennifer Garner

Ben Affleck knows how to give a good interview.

The Accountant 2 star talked with GQ — his first in-depth chat since divorcing Jennifer Lopez in August 2024 — and let readers in beyond the headlines. From his co-parenting relationship with Jennifer Garner to what went wrong with his Batman era, here are the buzziest moments from Affleck's sit-down.

Affleck says he and Garner 'work together well'

The Oscar winner has a pretty good head on his shoulders about fame as someone who's been in the spotlight for three decades. Now he just cares about how it impacts his kids.

"We used to have a thing, my ex-wife and I, when they would see something on a supermarket stand, we would say, well, 'You know this isn’t always true because if it were, you would have 15 brothers or sisters or whatever the number of stories is where they said that your mom was pregnant,'" he said. "And I'm really lucky that I have a really good co-parent and partner in Jennifer Garner, the kids' mom, who's wonderful and great and we work together well. It's more of a headache than anything else, and there certainly are worse things."

Despite photos of Garner and Affleck looking cozy during a recent paintball outing with their son, there is apparently no truth to rumors of a reconciliation. She's dating businessman John Miller.

About those rumors that fame played a role in J.Lo split ...

Lopez filed for divorce from Affleck in August, and much was speculated on by the press about their split. Sources claimed their different approaches to fame caused a rift in their rekindled romance. Affleck said it’s not that simple.

"There are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them. My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers," he explained. "As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude toward these things. And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that?"

Affleck talked about participating in Lopez's documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told and wanting to do it in an "honest way."

"I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that," he said. "And I think the thing that I said in that documentary or the piece that they used was where I said, You don’t marry a ship captain and then say, 'Well, I don’t like going out in the water.' You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship. And I think it’s important to say that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture."

Affleck added, "It’s not like you can watch that documentary and go, 'Oh, now I understand the issues that these two had.'"

Affleck was nervous his J.Lo quotes wouldn't be communicated right

The GQ interview happened over two days. During the second sit-down, Affleck circled back on his comments about Lopez. He wanted to make sure his comments made it "clear" she is someone "I have a lot of respect for."

"I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life. But I really hope that whatever you use doesn’t suggest that I have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that," he said. "I have nothing but respect. I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something. But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting."

By quotidian, he meant "there’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue."

"The truth is, when you talk to somebody, 'Hey, what happened?' Well, there is no: 'This is what happened.' It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do," he said, adding there wasn't some big event.

"It’s really, it sounds more like a couples therapy session, which — you would tune out of someone else’s couples therapy after a while," he continued. "For one thing, you start going, OK, clearly this person has got these issues. Clearly they have these issues.' And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable."

Affleck doesn't care if paparazzi catch him spilling coffee

Regarding his approach to fame, the actor doesn't think he presents "in a very careful way." He knows that can lead to viral moments.

"So I’ll go out and pick up the packages or deliveries and I don’t really care that people are there to take my picture. And some people are probably, I guess you’d call them smarter or more strategic because they think, well: 'I don’t want to be seen wearing some T-shirt or spilling some drink.' And I just think: Oh f*** it, man, I could give a shit," he said. "I just want to get the coffee."

This was Affleck's ‘we have a problem’ moment playing Batman

Affleck's postmortem on his Batman era shows mixed emotions.

"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," he said, but added how it started to "skew too old for a big part of the audience."

"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," he continued. "Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe."

Affleck, who is over five years sober, said filming Justice League was "a really excruciating experience." He took some blame for that.

"I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time," he said. "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."

Armageddon made no sense, but who cares?

Affleck's DVD commentary of the 1998 movie went viral when he talked about its ridiculous plot. He pats himself on the back for what "may be at least top five all-time DVD commentaries."

Billy Bob Thornton helped Affleck realize while shooting the Michael Bay film that it doesn't need to make sense why oil drillers went up to space to save the world.

"I remember Billy Bob was having a long conversation about a scene in the space mission control or whatever it was, and he was like, 'No, that’s OK, man. I can stop talking about it. I just kind of like to be in the kind of movies that make sense, you know what I mean? But f*** it, we don’t have to do that. We’re not doing that on this one. F*** it,'" Affleck recalled.

Although he didn't expect the film to be "genius," Affleck said he "was kind of surprised to find that sometimes they weren’t all that interested in making sense."

Affleck said he's not his Good Will Hunting character

The actor interacts with plenty of people who "assume" he and BFF Matt Damon are the characters they played (and wrote) in their Oscar-winning film.

"Matt’s math skills, I am pretty sure, are very far from genius level," Affleck joked.

"I’ve read some interviews of mine from back then, and I kind of think: This is a person who’s trying to use the longest words that they know," he said. "I was trying to be like, 'Look, I’m not stupid. Look, I’m smart.' Which is unfortunate because that energy of, 'Look at me, look, I’m this, look I’m that,' always has the opposite effect. It’s like, why is this guy selling me this car so hard?"