Ben Affleck credits recovering from alcoholism for 'The Way Back' performance

Ben Affleck gifts the internet so many wonderful memes that it's sometimes hard to remember that he is also an A-list actor. The 48-year-old discussed his latest big-screen portrayal for The Hollywood Reporter's "Actor Roundtable."

Affleck starred as disgraced high school basketball star Jack Cunningham seeking redemption as head coach at his alma mater in his most recent film The Way Back. Cunningham's inner demons reflected Affleck's, the two-time Oscar winner said:

"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. 

"But 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 — 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? I didn't have to do research for the alcoholism aspect of the movie — that was covered. It was the Daniel Day-Lewis approach to that!"

Affleck publicly admitted to relapsing in October 2019, which was around the same time the film was beginning production. Days before the movie's release last March, director Gavin O'Connor told 34th Street Magazine that it was Affleck's ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, who pled with O'Connor not to scrap the movie despite her ex-husband entering rehab.

It marked Affleck's fourth trip to rehab—with previous visits in 2001, '17 and '18—but while he called it "embarrassing" in a New York Times profile by Brooks Barnes, he also divulged that he was ridding himself of shame and acknowledged "there's a lot of alcoholism and mental illness in my family."

In terms of his work, Affleck served as executive producer on Zack Snyder's Justice League, in which he also reprised his Batman role, out March 18 on HBO Max. The Good Will Hunting icon also boosted his resume as a director with The Town (2010), Argo (2012) and Live by Night (2016).