Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s tactic when their kids see gossip about them
Ben Affleck has revealed a helpful tactic he and his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, employed to help their children avoid tabloids and gossip.
The Good Will Hunting actor and filmmaker, 52, was married to Garner, 52, from 2005 to 2018. They share three children: Violet, 19; Fin, 16; and Samuel, 13.
Speaking to British GQ for the April/May cover story, Affleck addressed the “absurd” and “ridiculous” rumor mill that has followed him and the 13 Going on 30 stars’ lives throughout their careers.
“There’s nothing newsworthy at all about the day-to-day events of my life or the conversation I have with one person or another person that’s photographed,” he said while admitting, “I’m definitely aware of the cosmic joke of it all.
“What I’ve ended up focusing on is: look, I know what’s going on in my life. And also, really more importantly, my kids know.”
Affleck continued: “We used to have a thing, my ex-wife and I, when they would see something on a supermarket stand, we would say, well, ‘You know this isn’t always true because if it were, you would have 15 brothers or sisters or whatever the number of stories is where they said that your mom was pregnant.’”
Praising Garner as a “really good co-parent and partner,” he added that gossip is “more of a headache than anything else and there are certainly worse things.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Affleck, who recently divorced Jennifer Lopez after two years of marriage, touched on a scene in the pop star’s 2024 documentary The Greatest Love Story Never Told, in which it appeared their preference for privacy differed.
Affleck and Lopez rekindled their romance in 2021, nearly 20 years after they broke off their first engagement “due to the excessive media attention surrounding [their] wedding.”
“My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers,” he told British GQ. “Like I mentioned to you before, there are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them.”
Explaining his participation in Lopez’s documentary, Affleck said: “Part of it was, ‘OK, if I’m going to participate in this, I want to try to do it in an honest way and in a way that’s interesting. Because I thought it was an interesting examination.”
“As happens in relationships, you don’t always have the same attitude towards these things,” he continued. “And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that? Because exactly what you said is true. I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that.
“You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship,” he said, clarifying that “that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture.”
