Performance Review: Ben Affleck Plays Himself

Becoming a tabloid star gave the actor his best role ever.

- Alison Willmore

FOR YEARS AFTER Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke up, it was treated as common knowledge that the relationship had almost ruined the actor’s career. “If I have a regret, it was doing the music video,” said Affleck in 2008, after he made his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone. He was referring to his appearance in 2002’s “Jenny From the Block,” which featured Affleck and Lopez being surveilled by paparazzi while trying to live their fabulous lives, something they were also doing for real. This brand of fame—gossip fame, inland fame—is not one to which serious actors expose themselves. Matt Damon, who has largely managed to avoid that kind of spotlight, returned to the narrative about his old friend in a recent New York Times Magazine profile: By Damon’s account, during and after Bennifer 1.0, Affleck felt he could “sell magazines but not movie tickets.” When the Times Magazine writer gave Affleck the chance to respond, the actor gently chided him for implying he had invited the attention. But he did not deny its effects. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but I would think that the process of suspending disbelief when watching an actor would be more difficult for an audience if they knew more about the person they’re watching,” he said. Did Bennifer hurt Affleck’s career? The calculations that go into fame have become so transparent in the 17 years since that relationship that for Affleck to dismiss the media circus as beneath his dignity feels naïve and a little self-serving. But one thing is definitely true: In a year when Affleck appears in three films (if you count “the Snyder Cut”), more people can name whom he’s dating than what he’s starring in. In July, the same month that Affleck informed the Times Magazine that he and Damon “have both assiduously tried to maintain our privacy,” Affleck was photographed lounging on a yacht