Ben Affleck clarifies his remarks about his past marriage to Jennifer Garner
Ben Affleck is setting the record straight after a recent interview of his made headlines for all the wrong reasons.
During a chat with Howard Stern on Sirius/XM's "The Howard Stern Show," Affleck spoke at length about his career, his failed marriage to Jennifer Garner and his battle with alcoholism, during which he said he "probably still would have been drinking" if he stayed with Garner.
The pair were married from 2005 to 2018.
"Part of why I started drinking was because I was trapped," the 49-year-old actor told Stern. "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 comments led fans to drag Affleck online, with some even using the hashtag #TeamGarner.
On "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" Wednesday night, Affleck responded, sharing his take on how the interview was received.
"It was really cool, longform, in-depth -- it was a two-hour interview and because the movie [The Tender Bar] is about family and all this stuff that’s meaningful to me," he said about his chat with Stern. "We talked a lot about my family and divorce and alcoholism and struggling with real things and how you have to be accountable and loving and how I work with my ex-wife, and how I’m so proud of the way we work together for our kids and do the best that we can for them."
Affleck said that following the interview, he was "very happy" with the chat and thought, "Wow, I should do more honest, exploratory, self-evaluating things."
He then said he saw some headlines about the interview, which he felt manipulated what he had said. "I was like, 'What is this?' ... they had literally taken the conversation that I had had for two hours and made it seem as if I was saying the exact opposite of what I had said," he shared.
"I had gone on and said how much we respect each other, cared about each other, cared about our kids and put them first and went through our stuff, and they said I had blamed my ex-wife for my alcoholism and that I was ‘trapped’ in this marriage -- just made me out to be the worst, most insensitive, stupid awful guy," he added.
The "Tender Bar" star insisted that the headline-grabbing drinking comment was taken out of context.
"I want to be clear -- that’s not true," he stated. "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 that I would ever say a bad word about their mom."
Affleck shares daughters Violet, 16, and Seraphina, 12, and 9-year-old son Samuel with the former "Alias" star.
