Ben Affleck's divorce has made him a better actor.
Ben Affleck
The 48-year-old star believes his life experiences, including the 2015 end of his nine-year marriage to Jennifer Garner and raising their three children, Violet, 15, Seraphina, 12, and eight-year-old Samuel, have influenced his performances because they have given him more to draw on when it comes to informing his characters and they have also made him enjoy his job more.
Discussing his movie 'The Way Back', he said: "For me the movie was much more about the fact that -- whether it’s having lived enough years having seen enough ups and downs having had children and divorce having experienced a lot of different things -- I’m at a point now in my life where I have sufficient life experience to bring to a role to make it really interesting for me. I’m not good enough to just invent it from whole cloth, you know?
"Growing older and having had more intense and meaningful personal experiences has made acting much more interesting for me and in turn made me drawn to the kinds of movies that are about people who are flawed."
In 'The Way Back' Ben plays an alcoholic and he admitted he didn't need to do much research because of his own personal issues.
He added: "I'm a recovering alcoholic and I played an alcoholic in the movie. It's really about grief and losing a child, which, thank God, I have not experienced, and is probably the worst thing you can experience.
"But also, a lot of it is about alcoholism. Alcoholism, in and of itself, and compulsive behavior, are not inherently super interesting, but what is sometimes interesting is what you discover about yourself in the course of recovery and trying to figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, how you want your life to look and what kind of ethics you want to live by.
"So yes, I'm an alcoholic. Yes, I had a relapse. Yes, I went into recovery again. And then I went and did that movie...
"I didn’t have to do research for the alcoholism aspect of the movie -- that was covered.”
As he grows closer to 50, Ben is more content with his life than ever before.
Speaking to Gary Oldman, John David Washington, Delroy Lindo, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Steven Yeun for The Hollywood Reporter's Actor Roundtable, he said: "I'll be 50 in two years.
"I have three children I want to spend time with, I have a life that I really enjoy, and I want to really love my work and tell these kinds of stories, with characters that are as rich as the ones that you all portrayed."
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