Ben Affleck

Info

Full Name: Benjamin Geza Affleck-Boldt
Date of birth: August 15, 1972 (54 years old)
Location: Berkeley, California
Country: USA
Height: 1,92m
Redes sociales: X Facebook Instagram

Ben Affleck has been active for 37 years, participating in 62 movies that average a 6.6/10 score.

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Biography

In 2015 the Razzies, which have been singling out Hollywood's worst efforts every year since 1981, handed out an unusual prize: the Razzie Redeemer Award. It went to Ben Affleck, the same actor they'd named worst actor of the year in 2004 for three films at once. In between, he'd directed three well received films and walked on stage to collect the Oscar for Best Picture. That's the shape of his career: very public falls, followed by comebacks nobody saw coming.

Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt was born on 15 August 1972 in Berkeley, California, but grew up in Massachusetts, first in Falmouth and then in Cambridge. His mother, Chris Anne Boldt, had studied at Harvard and taught in public schools. His father, Timothy Affleck, wanted to be a playwright and drifted between jobs as a carpenter, mechanic and janitor while struggling with alcoholism. They divorced when Ben was eleven. His younger brother is the actor Casey Affleck.

When he was eight he met a boy two years older who lived a couple of streets away and also wanted to act: Matt Damon. It became one of the best known friendships in American film. Ben started acting as a child, and from 1984 to 1988 he was one of the leads in 'The Voyage of the Mimi', an educational series made for PBS. After high school he spent short spells at the University of Vermont and at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he studied Middle Eastern affairs, but he never finished his degree.

From bit parts to an Oscar

The early roles were small. He appeared alongside Damon in 'School Ties' (1992) and got noticed as the high school bully in 'Dazed and Confused' (1993), directed by Richard Linklater. Soon after he met Kevin Smith, who made him a regular in his New Jersey comedies: 'Mallrats' (1995), 'Chasing Amy' (1997), his first real leading role, 'Dogma' (1999) and 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' (2001).

Meanwhile, Affleck and Damon got tired of waiting for parts that weren't coming and wrote their own film. The result was 'Good Will Hunting' (1997), directed by Gus Van Sant, with Damon as a maths genius working as a janitor at MIT, Affleck as his best friend and Robin Williams as the therapist who gets through to him. The script won the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. At 25, Affleck became the youngest winner in that category.

Box office star and tabloid fixture

The Oscar opened every door. Michael Bay cast him in 'Armageddon' (1998) alongside Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler, and it was the highest grossing film of the year worldwide. The same year he had a supporting role in 'Shakespeare in Love', opposite his then girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow. Then came 'Forces of Nature' (1999), 'Reindeer Games' (2000), 'Pearl Harbor' (2001), again with Bay, and 'The Sum of All Fears' (2002), in which he took over the role of Jack Ryan from Harrison Ford.

From 2002, though, his private life started to overshadow the work. His relationship with Jennifer Lopez, whom he met on the set of 'Gigli', was the tabloids' favourite story, and they were soon known as 'Bennifer'. They got engaged in November 2002, postponed the wedding just days before it was due in September 2003, and confirmed they'd split in January 2004.

Professionally, things weren't going any better. 'Gigli' (2003) was a notorious flop, and neither 'Daredevil' (2003), 'Paycheck' (2003), 'Jersey Girl' (2004) nor 'Surviving Christmas' (2004) won people over. That's where the triple Razzie came from. He's since called 'Daredevil' the only film he regrets making, although it did bring him back together with Jennifer Garner, whom he'd first met on 'Pearl Harbor'.

Affleck and Garner married on 29 June 2005 in the Turks and Caicos Islands and had three children: Violet (2005), Fin (2009) and Samuel (2012). They announced their separation in 2015 and the divorce was finalised in 2018, but they still raise their children together and remain on good terms. During those years he also spoke openly about his struggle with alcohol, which had first taken him to rehab in 2001 and for which he sought treatment again in 2017 and 2018.

The director nobody expected

The turnaround started with a supporting role. In 'Hollywoodland' (2006) he played George Reeves, television's Superman in the 1950s, whose death in 1959 is still surrounded by questions. It won him the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination. The following year he took the step that would change his career and moved behind the camera.

His debut, 'Gone Baby Gone' (2007), an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's novel starring his brother Casey, took critics by surprise. Three years later he directed, co-wrote and starred in 'The Town' (2010), a heist thriller set in Boston's Charlestown neighbourhood that did very well at the box office. That same year he also starred in 'The Company Men', a drama about the layoffs of the financial crisis.

The big one was 'Argo' (2012), based on the true story of six American diplomats who got out of Iran in 1980 by posing as a film crew. Affleck directed and starred, and the film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, which he collected with his fellow producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov. He also won the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for Best Director, which made it all the more striking that the Academy hadn't nominated him as director at all.

On screen, this period took in 'State of Play' (2009), 'He's Just Not That Into You' (2009), Terrence Malick's 'To the Wonder' (2012) and 'Runner Runner' (2013). His best role of those years came from David Fincher in 'Gone Girl' (2014), where he played Nick Dunne, a husband everyone suspects after his wife, played by Rosamund Pike, goes missing. A few months later, the Razzies came calling with their redemption prize.

Batman and writing with Damon again

In 2013 Warner Bros. announced Affleck as the new Batman, and the news was met with fan complaints and even online petitions. He first wore the cape in 'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' (2016), directed by Zack Snyder, facing Henry Cavill's Superman, and returned in 'Justice League' (2017), 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' (2021) and with a brief appearance in 'The Flash' (2023). He was also set to direct a standalone Batman film, but eventually walked away from it.

In 2016 he released 'The Accountant', a thriller about an autistic accountant with a double life that went on to build a loyal following, and 'Live by Night', his fourth film as director, which flopped. Then came 'Triple Frontier' (2019) for Netflix, with Oscar Isaac. In 'Finding the Way Back' (2020) he played an alcoholic former basketball player coaching a high school team, a part close to his own relapses that critics counted among the best work of his career.

In 2021 he wrote with Damon again, almost 25 years after 'Good Will Hunting'. Together with Nicole Holofcener they scripted Ridley Scott's 'The Last Duel', in which he also played a 14th century French count. That year he worked for Clooney in 'The Tender Bar', which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and in 2022 he starred in 'Deep Water' with Ana de Armas, whom he dated for about a year.

Artists Equity and the second round of 'Bennifer'

In 2022 Affleck and Damon launched Artists Equity, a production company that shares a slice of each film's profits with the people who make it, with Affleck as chief executive. Its first release was 'Air' (2023), which he directed, keeping for himself the role of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, with Damon as the scout Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis as Michael Jordan's mother.

As an actor he followed it with 'Hypnotic' (2023), 'The Accountant 2' (2025), again alongside Jon Bernthal, and 'The Rip' (2026), a cop thriller from Joe Carnahan that became one of Netflix's most watched films of the year. On the side he'd set up InterPositive, a company making AI tools for post-production, which Netflix bought in March 2026 for $587 million. Affleck stayed on as an adviser.

His love life was back on the front pages in 2021, when he got back together with Jennifer Lopez almost two decades after their breakup. They married in a surprise ceremony in Las Vegas on 16 July 2022 and held a second wedding at his estate in Georgia a month later. It didn't last: Lopez filed for divorce on 20 August 2024, exactly two years after that party, and the divorce was finalised in early 2025.

2026 brought two losses. In June his mother died of pancreatic cancer at 83, and in September Casey revealed at the Venice Film Festival that their father had also died that year. Away from film, Affleck has run the Eastern Congo Initiative since 2010, funding local organisations in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and he's a devoted Boston Red Sox fan.

Next up is 'Animals', arriving on Netflix on 9 October 2026. Affleck directs, co-wrote the script with Billy Ray and Connor McIntyre, and plays a Los Angeles mayoral candidate whose son is kidnapped, with Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson and Steven Yeun in the cast. It'll be his sixth film as director, more than thirty years after he played that bully in 'Dazed and Confused'.