Ben Affleck shares the sad moment he told his son he was no longer Batman
Ben Affleck has shared his 7-year-old son’s reaction to finding out his dad was no longer Batman, and it’s rather heartbreaking stuff.
The 46-year-old actor says he explained to his son that it was simply someone else’s turn to be the Dark Knight. Talking to Entertainment Tonight, Affleck says Samuel, whose mother is Affleck’s ex-wife Jennifer Garner, took it well.
“He took the news okay. He kind of understands that there’s time for everything,” Affleck said.
“[Samuel] is not quite old enough to understand that I was gonna direct [a Batman movie], but I couldn’t figure out how to do it,” the 46-year-old Gone Girl star shared, adding, “I didn’t love it enough.”
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“I just kinda stuck with like, you know, ‘It was my turn and now it somebody else’s turn.’ Because he understands turn taking,” Affleck said.
For Samuel’s 4th birthday, Affleck borrowed his Bat-suit from Warner Bros. to dress as the Caped Crusader at his son’s superhero-themed party.
“We all dressed up, I dressed up as a ninja and Ben dressed up as Batman for Sam,” Jennifer Garner told Entertainment Weekly in 2016, adding that it “was the best dad moment in history.”
The Oscar-winning filmmaker confirmed he was stepping down as Batman on Jimmy Kimmel Live in February, after having originally planned to star in, and direct, 2021’s The Batman.
Affleck said: “I tried to direct a version of it, I worked with a really good screenwriter, but I couldn’t crack it. And so I thought it was time for someone else to take a shot at it, and they’ve got really good people.”
Talking at a recent press event, the actor admitted that he never truly nailed what he wanted his version of The Batman to be.
“That was part of the problem,” admitted Affleck candidly to IGN. “We worked on the script, I was trying to figure out how to crack it, and I was never happy enough with it where I thought it was worth going out and making it because I just didn’t want to do a version that I wasn’t really excited by, so I still don’t know.”
Affleck joined the DC movie universe as Bruce Wayne for 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He reprised the role in Suicide Squad in the same year, and in 2017’s Justice League.
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War For The Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves eventually replaced Affleck as the director of his standalone in 2017, and now the actor is no longer involved in that film at all by the sounds of it.
Ben Affleck can next be seen in Netflix’s Triple Frontier, which lands on 13 March, 2019.
