Ben Affleck got candid about how the heartbreaking deaths of his parents led him to re-evaluate what matters most to him.
The “Gone Girl” star recalled losing his dad, Timothy, and mom, Chris, two months apart in April and June of this year, respectively.
“It’s a big year of life,” he told GQin an interview published Tuesday, explaining that he’s been forced to reflect on his childhood and how he was raised.
“That’s a lot, man,” Ben, 54, continued. “You appreciate your parents in different ways, and you think about your own mortality and your own life and your own children and what you want to do with it.”
“And the bare fact of the very fleeting nature of all of our lives kind of stares you back in the face,” the actor added, admitting he realized he only had “so much time” left and his “youthful illusions” of believing he would have more “answers” and solutions to life as he got older had faded.
“Often the end of life isn’t full of wisdom and resolve,” he explained. “Stuff you haven’t fixed in life stays unfixed.”
“You face that stuff and it makes you think, ‘Okay, how do I want to spend the rest of this time?’ Because you realize there’s not all that much of it,” Ben said.
While the “Pearl Harbor” star didn’t elaborate on how he’d like to prioritize his time, he recently shared his main priority was his three children, Violet, 20, Seraphina, 17, and Sam, 14, whom he shares with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.
Ben went on to tenderly remember his mom, Chris, as “pretty extraordinary and brave.”
“I mean, she’s an amazing woman and her death really did cause me to even more deeply and fully appreciate her and her life,” he told the outlet.
The “Good Will Hunting” star also labeled his parents as “lucky” for living “long lives … longer than one’s expectation.”
“That’s kind of what you get,” Ben said. “I mean, my mom said to me at one point, ‘I had a great life and I have no regrets, but I thought 83 years would feel like longer.”
Timothy died in April at the age of 76. However, the patriarch’s death was kept under wraps until September, when Ben’s brother, Casey, announced the passingduring the 2026 Venice International Film Festival.
While discussing his movie “Company,” the director told reporters, “It’s dedicated to my parents because I lost both my mom and my dad this year, and they were very important to me.”
Timothy’s cause of death hasn’t been revealed. As for Chris, she died in June following a battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 83.
Chris and Timothy tied the knot in the early 1970s and separated in 1984, before Ben and Casey were teenagers.
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