Ben Affleck has opened up in a new interview about his time as Batman and why he doesn't see himself returning to superhero films.
In a new profile from GQ, Affleck has opened up a bit more about his time as Batman. "There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience," said the actor. "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. 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"
He went on to explain, "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."
"What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience," said Affleck. "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. His hope is to avoid situations such as his. "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."
