‘My life is actually pretty drama-free’ Swears The Most Dramatic Man Alive
The Friday Post.
In tonight’s Friday Post: a close read of the Ben Affleck GQ cover … Jonah Platt’s radical reimagining of the first amendment … an update on Martha Stewart’s memoir … and the Gwyneth-Meghan Markle sit-down …
What would you call a turn of events wherein you publicly woo your ex from 20 years ago via magazine covers and love letters, you papp walk in New York City to slowly roll out your relationship, you hard launch at the Venice Film Festival, you have two separate wedding ceremonies only to get divorced shortly after the release of an album, a music video, and a documentary about all of it? It’s actually all a bit quotidian,1 according to Ben Affleck. His life, he told GQ, “is actually pretty drama-free.”
Affleck is on the cover of GQ this month, in a rare Q&A so great I wish I could listen to it as a podcast. Bennifer is not Bennifer because a famous actor and a famous musician dated, got engaged, broke up, only to date, marry, and divorce 20 years later. Bennifer is Bennifer because after all of it, that actor dabs on Just for Men and poses for GQ to say that it’s all actually quite boring. Sorry, not boring — quotidian.
“When you asked me about Jen and the documentary and I talked about that and my sort of personal life a little bit, which I don’t mind doing as long as my actual feelings and intentions and beliefs are communicated, which I hope I was clear that really this is somebody I have a lot of respect for,” Affleck said. “And I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life. But I really hope that whatever you use doesn’t suggest that I have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that. I have nothing but respect. I guess there’s a tendency to look at breakups and want to identify root causes or something. But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting.”
There was no major fight or big disagreement. “Yeah, there’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue. The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no: ‘This is what happened.’ It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do,” Affleck continued. “And as you get older, this is true for me, I assume it’s true for most people, there is no ‘So-and-so did this’ or ‘This was the big event.’ It’s really, it sounds more like a couple’s therapy session, which—you would tune out of someone else’s couple’s therapy after a while. For one thing, you start going, “Okay, clearly this person has got these issues. Clearly they have these issues.” And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable.”
I love an answer like that, chatty and candid but totally opaque. Not since Kendall Roy have I been so impressed with a sentence that gestures toward something so large without saying much of anything at all. There’s no scandal or soap opera says the man whose last sixteen months would give even the frenetic pace of Gossip Girl’s first season a run for its Butter reservation.
Affleck zeroes in on his appeal completely. “I think I don’t present in a very careful way. So I’ll go out and pick up the packages or deliveries and I don’t really care that people are there to take my picture. And some people are probably, I guess you’d call them smarter or more strategic because they think, well: ‘I don’t want to be seen wearing some T-shirt or spilling some drink.’ And I just think: Oh fuck it, man, I could give a shit. I just want to get the coffee. So maybe that’s a part of it, because people are accustomed to a more presented, curated image.”2 I’m thrilled by this contrast: Affleck playing the smoldering studio head, offering thoughtful ideas about the realities of his business, but really we’ve all convened here today to know what he has to say about his divorce.
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