Ben Affleck covers Details Magazine October 2012. Inside the issue, the 40-year-old recounts an anecdote about working with younger actors like Blake Lively in The Town, during the filming of which her inability to link Affleck and Matt Damon made the former feel old.
On touring around Boston with Blake Lively: “When I was doing The Town, I’d tour the actors around Boston. I was with Blake, and I saw Matt [Damon]’s childhood home. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where Matt grew up.’ And she said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Matt Damon.’ And she said, ‘Oh my God! You know Jason Bourne?!’ She really didn’t know. And I thought, ‘There it is. The first age of people who are adults who missed the whole Matt and Ben propaganda campaign!’ Mostly, it just made me feel old.”
On perceptions of he and Damon: “I started to realize that people conflated us, or particularly me, with the characters. People assumed that I was the amiable, dim-witted friend, right? [Laughs] Which wasn’t exactly what I was going for! Matt and I have had a friendship for 25 years. We don’t get wound up about that stuff. You learn to roll your eyes.”
On balancing work and family: “Absolutely. Anytime you think, ‘I’m wasting my time here,’ the first thought you have is ‘I could go home and be with my kids.’ Now, you may go home and be with your kids and very quickly start thinking, ‘I wonder what’s on the work front?’ Because running around after three kids is very trying. Now everything has to compete with being with my family. I don’t want to be a stay-at-home dad. Work is very important to me. I like to work. So does my wife. But I need my work to mean something to me in order for me to not be home with them.”
On Gigli and his ex-fiance Jennifer Lopez: “In our culture, we get very much into short-handing people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer… blah, blah, blah. It’s hard to shake those sort of narratives. If you were looking at that one-liner on me in 2003, which was definitely the annus horribilis [laughs] of my life. I made a bunch of movies that didn’t work. I was ending up in the tabloids. I don’t know what the lesson is, except that you just have to find your compass… People bring up 2003, and I get it. Jennifer Lopez, and Gigli, and all this shit just kind of blew up. But, you know, in 2003, Barack Obama was a state senator in Illinois! Okay?” - via Details Magazine.
