In the past couple of weeks, Affleck has been vocal about his 'painful' divorce, addiction and the ways his new movie hits home.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner continue to be there for one another.
The former couple was spotted hanging out in Los Angeles on Thursday amid Affleck's emotional press tour for his new movie, The Way Back. The actor was seen wearing a black long-sleeve shirt with dark grey pants and dark tennis shoes. Garner was casually dressed in a black T-shirt, jeans and grey boots.
The pair split in 2015 after 10 years of marriage and settled their divorce in 2018. They share three children, Violet, 14, Seraphina, 11, and Samuel, 8.
Affleck, who's been open about his struggle with alcohol, plays Jack Cunningham, a basketball coach dealing with addiction, in The Way Back.
In the past couple of weeks, Affleck has been vocal about his "painful" divorce, addiction and the ways his new movie hits home. In a new interview with Associated Press, the actor admitted that the film was "hard to make."
"Sometimes just feeling those feelings again purges them a little bit and frees you a little bit. This movie was hard to make. Sometimes it was painful. And sometimes I was embarrassed. And sometimes I couldn’t believe my life had any similarity to this," he shared.
The Way Back's director, Gavin O’Connor, recalled a scene where Affleck's character is attempting to apologize to his wife. "It was probably the second take, Ben just had a breakdown. I’m getting chills thinking about it. It was like the dam broke and everything came out," O'Connor explained. "I just remember the crew, everyone was frozen, watching him bear his soul. It was obviously real. A lot of things that he probably had to say in his own life, or maybe he had said, I don’t know."
ET also sat down with Affleck during his press tour, where he expressed that he saw his personal experience with the topic as "an advantage" when making the flick, adding that he was "feeling a full range of kind of access to my emotions" and felt "ready to do a heavy, performance-based piece."
"I knew that in this day and age of celebrities' personal lives becoming news stories, those were questions I was kind of going to answer anyway," he said. "The interesting thing for me was to be able to define the story myself, the way I see it, which is really one of hope."
"I know and have a lot of friends who have dealt with issues like this compulsive behavior and addictive behavior, and the vast majority of them are really honest, accountable people living good, healthy lives," Affleck added. "The idea that life gets better, that you can get better, that you can overcome your obstacles, is a really important one to me and that's the approach I liked about this movie. It was not just like, 'Oh, there is alcoholism.' That's kind of ordinary."
Affleck even described the making of the movie as containing "a certain amount of therapy" due to its "emotional honesty."
Hear more of what he shared in the video below.
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