Getting a big-budget superhero role is a career-ending experience for some actors. For others, such as most Hollywood’s Batmen throughout the years, such as Robert Pattinson, Christian Bale, and Michael Keaton, it’s an enjoyable part of their filmography that doesn’t define them. For some, or perhaps even one performer, it is something to be seen with dismay and hatred. Ben Affleck is, of course, that performer.
Affleck’s dissatisfaction during his “Batfleck” phase was widely reported and frequently used as meme material. In addition to portraying the role in both Justice League iterations, he initially assumed the role for Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. His final appearance as Batman was in The Flash in 2023. It also appears like Affleck will never be seen again because DC’s leadership is now in new hands, and at least one new Batman has been formed in Robert Pattinson.
Despite The Accountant 2 coming up soon, according to a recent interview with GQ, he seems to have found more creative fulfillment in producing and directing than acting lately. One possible explanation is his unsatisfactory mental state while working on the Justice League set.
“There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever,” he told the magazine. “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. 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 also realized that things could have become too gloomy for Batman and the rest of the DC Extended Universe. “It started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. 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,’” he recalled. “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.”
He’s not the only one who feels this way. As we’ve reported in the past, both Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot also felt the darker tone was a bad fit.
It wasn’t a complete waste of time, though. “I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two,” Affleck said. “In terms of creatively, 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.”
Do you agree that the Zack Snyder DC Universe was too dark? Let us know in the comments!
(Via GQ h/t XRock 103.9)
