Yahoo Lifestyle After Years Of Speculation Over His Health, Ben Affleck Explained Why He Thinks It Would Have Been “Better” To Keep His Sobriety “Anonymous”
Content warning: This post discusses alcoholism.
It’s no secret that Ben Affleck has struggled with alcohol misuse throughout his career. He first visited a rehab facility in 2001. According to the New York Times, he sought treatment for alcohol addiction on subsequent occasions in 2017 and again in 2018 following his divorce from Jennifer Garner.
Since then, he’s had to navigate sobriety in the spotlight, which has unfortunately involved addressing relapse speculation on more than one occasion. And now, after previously expressing frustrations over becoming “one of the poster boys for actor alcoholism,” Ben elaborated on the downsides of his sobriety being public knowledge.
During a new interview with GQ, Ben recalled drawing from his personal experiences while playing an alcoholic in The Way Back. The 2020 film was shot when he was newly sober, and looking back, Ben said he didn’t mind his sobriety being a talking point at the time — although he doesn’t love how his relationship with alcohol remains a big part of his public identity today.
“I didn’t have any ambitions to be the national spokesman for recovering alcoholics,” he said. “And not because I have any shame with it or anything. I just find that, I’ve been sober for more than five years, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind. It’s not the central preoccupation of my life.” Ben has talked openly about his alcoholism, but, as is the case for many celebrities, it wasn’t his choice to have the world let in on his personal struggles. In light of this, he said: “If I could have, I would’ve kept the fact that I’m sober anonymous.”
“I think it works better that way. And I didn’t ask for that to become something people knew about. But I can’t complain about it either,” he said, as he expressed gratitude for where he is today. “I understood doing this job and doing this life, if something happened like that, people were going to know about it, and they did. And I have arrived at a place where I think of that experience as part of my life in authentically grateful ways, whereas I didn’t think such a thing was possible before. So that sort of is what it is.”
This is not the first time Ben has opened up about the complications of navigating his health publicly. Discussing his recovery during a 2023 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the Gone Girl star said bluntly: “You don’t need to be anybody’s poster child. You don’t need to fucking tell anybody. That’s why there’s two words on the front of the book. They’re just as important, both of them: Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s always anonymous.”
You can read his full GQ cover interview here.
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