Ben Affleck Dishes on His ‘Fiercely Competitive’ Celebrity Wordle Group and What He Really Thinks About Batfleck

Photo by: Ik Aldama/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Ben Affleck, pictured above looking less-than-enthusiastic at an event to promote the Justice League film, dished on a wide variety of topics in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, including a “fiercely competitive” Wordle battle he has with fellow celebrities, a slam on some “deliberately mischaracterized” clickbait in the New York Post, and what he really thinks about the whole Batfleck saga.

The interview with THR’s Rebecca Keegan was published Thursday and goes in-depth on Affleck’s various movie roles, the production company he’s just launched with longtime pal/collaborator Matt Damon, and their first upcoming film project, Air, which tells the story of Nike’s groundbreaking partnership with Michael Jordan.

The Wordle celeb competition came up when Keegan asked Affleck about his recent bout with Covid. He said that he “just got annihilated” and had “no energy…where it was too much work to pick up the phone to play Octordle.”

“To play what?” asked Keegan.

Affleck explained that Octordle was “just Wordle with more words” (it’s a version of the popular word game where you guess eight words at once) but that she shouldn’t be impressed because “it’s not harder.” He then talked about how he battled Damon, Jason Bateman, and Bradley Cooper for Wordle bragging rights:

I was invited to join a cool little red velvet rope celebrity Wordle group…I used to do the crossword compulsively in the mornings and think I was good at word games. And let’s face it, going up against actors, it’s not a high bar. I expected to do fairly well, so I was seriously humbled. You have to do the Wordle, the Quordle and the Octordle, and add up your score, and then whoever gets the lowest score wins for the day. It’s fiercely competitive, and there’s a lot of mockery and derision. So I’m in training.

Affleck said wife Jennifer Lopez had given him a “pep talk” before the interview because she thinks he’s “become very guarded” from past bad experiences with the press, mentioning one “really painful experience” where he was “really vulnerable” in an interview, “and the entire pickup was something that was not only not right, it was actually the opposite of what I meant.”

Keegan followed up, asking if he was referring to a Howard Stern show where he discussed his drinking during the end of his marriage to Jennifer Garner. Affleck replied yes and took a swipe at The New York Post for taking his comments out of context to make it sound like he was blaming Garner for his drinking:

To be clear, my behavior is my responsibility entirely. The point that I was trying to make was a sad one. Anyone who’s been through divorce makes that calculus of, How much do we try? We loved each other. We care about each other. We have respect for each other. I was trying to say, “Hey, look, I was drinking too much, and the less happy you become, whether it’s your job, your marriage, it’s just that as your life becomes more difficult, if you’re doing things to fill a hole that aren’t healthy, you’re going to start doing more of those things.” I think I was pretty articulate about that. It was the New York Post who deliberately mischaracterized it in order to make it clickbait, and everyone else then picked it up, and it didn’t matter how many times I said, “I do not feel this way. I’m telling you, I don’t blame my ex-wife for my alcoholism.” So, yeah. It’s hard.

Affleck discussed in detail his various performances as Batman, calling the experience of filming Justice League so miserable that it made him not want to direct a future Batman project.

“You could teach a seminar on all the reasons why this is how not to do it. Ranging from production to bad decisions to horrible personal tragedy, and just ending with the most monstrous taste in my mouth,” said Affleck, calling the film “the worst experience I’ve ever seen in an experience which is full of some shitty experiences”:

It broke my heart. There was an idea of someone [Joss Whedon] coming in, like, “I’ll rescue you and we’ll do 60 days of shooting and I’ll write a whole thing around what you have. I’ve got the secret.” And it wasn’t the secret. That was hard. And I started to drink too much. I was back at the hotel in London, it was either that or jump out the window. And I just thought, “This isn’t the life I want. My kids aren’t here. I’m miserable.” You want to go to work and find something interesting to hang onto, rather than just wearing a rubber suit, and most of it you’re just standing against the computer screen going, “If this nuclear waste gets loose, we’ll …” That’s fine. I don’t condescend to that or put it down, but I got to a point where I found it creatively not satisfying. Also just, you’re sweaty and exhausted.

Affleck did note that Justice League had ended up his “highest-rated” movie after the release of the Zack Snyder cut, commenting on the bizarreness of “getting congratulated for the bomb I’m in,” with the film going from the “nadir” of his career to the “pinnacle.”

He also touted his final performance as the Caped Crusader in The Flash, saying that he “nailed it.”

“For the five minutes I’m there, it’s really great,” said Affleck.

Read Affleck’s full interview here.