Ben Affleck has been open about his struggles with alcohol and challenges being under the cowl in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice (2016), Suicide Squad (2016) Justice League (2017) and The Flash (2023). But it wasn’t all bad.

“I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two,” the actor-director says in a new interview. “In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie,” the actor recently told GQ.

Justice League, it seems, was a different story — for many reasons.

“I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”

Among those failings was a burgeoning drinking habit.

“I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart,” the actor told the New York Times in 2020. When asked about drinking alone in his hotel room, Affleck admits he was doing that “quite a bit” on Justice League, which he has also called his nadir.

“You’re trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever,” he explained. “But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”

Affleck’s self-criticism is aimed not so much at his performances but “what I was bringing to work every day” on set.

“I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge,” he told GQ. “But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”

That realization and others led the two time Oscar winner to step back from another stint inside the cowl on The Batman (2022).

“I showed somebody The Batman script,” Affleck told the Times. “They said, ‘I think the script is good. I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went though again.”

There have also been moments that his struggles and specifically his sobriety, now five years strong, have aided Affleck’s work.

“I knew with The Way Back, like, ‘Okay, look, people know I’m an alcoholic or in recovery, I’m going to have to have a conversation about this.’ I didn’t really mind that. I maybe underestimated the degree to which — I didn’t have any ambitions to be the national spokesman for recovering alcoholics. And not because I have any shame with it or anything. I just find that, I’ve been sober for more than five years, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind. It’s not the central preoccupation of my life.”

The confluence of role and public perception was not exactly intentional, he says.

“If I could have, I would’ve kept the fact that I’m sober anonymous, because I think it works better that way. And I didn’t ask for that to become something people knew about. But I can’t complain about it either. I understood doing this job and doing this life, if something happened like that, people were going to know about it, and they did. And I have arrived at a place where I think of that experience as part of my life in authentically grateful ways, whereas I didn’t think such a thing was possible before.”