Ben Affleck is not pleased with the narrative circulating about him and is claiming his words were taken out of context.
The “Good Will Hunting” alum made headlines earlier this week following an interview with Howard Stern. During their conversation, the 49-year-old star made it sound like his ex-wife Jennifer Garner was the main catalyst for his past alcohol abuse.
“We probably would’ve ended up at each other’s throats,” Affleck told Stern, according to PageSix. “I probably still would’ve been drinking. … Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped.”
But now that fans are slamming the actor’s comments, he’s backtracking while claiming the whole conversation requires context, not just one little snippet. Affleck sat down with Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday night to try and clear his name.
Affleck said the quotes making round on social media, “made it seem as if I was saying the exact opposite of what I said.”
He explained, “I had gone on and said how much we respect each other and cared about each other and cared about our kids and put them first and went through our stuff.”
Affleck said the quote made him sound like he, “blamed my ex-wife for my alcoholism and that I was trapped in this marriage… just made me out to be like the worst, most insensitive, stupid, awful guy.”
But the Academy Award winner claims none of these claims represent how he really feels, E News reported.
“That’s not true,” Affleck told Kimmel. “I don’t believe that. It’s the exact opposite of who I am, what I believe and I would never want my kids to think I would ever say a bad word about their mom… it hurts my feelings.”
Originally, the actor had explained that turning to alcohol was a way of coping with stress and depression. But he stayed in the marriage despite being unhappy for the sake of the three children Garner and Affleck share.
“I was like, ‘I can’t leave because of my kids, but I’m not happy, what do I do?’ And what I did was [I] drank a bottle of scotch and fell asleep on the couch, which turned out not to be the solution,” the “Justice League” star told Stern during their conversation.
Eventually, he and Garner agreed that they didn’t want their relationship to “be the model that our kids see of marriage.”
And this wasn’t the first time Affleck got personal about his struggle with alcoholism. The Daily Wire reported that the star detailed his addiction during a 2020 interview as well.
“People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they’re trying to make go away,” the actor told The New York Times in 2020. “You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break.”
He continued, blaming himself for harming his marriage. “I drank relatively normally for a long time….What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”