Ben Affleck said that, while he enjoyed playing Batman in Zack Snyder’s DCEU, he has no desire to return to the superhero genre and, in retrospect, feels his take on Bruce Wayne may have skewed “too old.”
Affleck’s Bruce Wayne first appeared in Snyder’s DCEU in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. After briefly reprising the role for a quick scene in 2016’s Suicide Squad, Affleck’s character then reappeared in 2017’s Justice League, 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and 2023’s The Flash.
What did Ben Affleck say about playing Zack Snyder’s Batman in the DCEU?
Speaking with GQ Magazine, Affleck recalled how his time on the Justice League set was a “really excruciating experience.”
“[Those experiences] don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever,” he explained. “I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, and expectations. And also, by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
Regarding his time playing Batman, as a whole, Affleck said, “I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two. In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.
“But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that, I was like, ‘Oh sh—, we have a problem.’ Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”
