In the first episode of the new season of Hart to Heart, comedian Kevin Hart’s interview show on Peacock, Oscar winner Ben Affleck delves deep into his anxieties surrounding his career, and origins in Hollywood. While Affleck largely skirts his personal life, he does share a few insights into what it’s like to be married to multi-hyphenate mega-star Jennifer Lopez.
At the moment, relentless rumors have it that Lopez and Affleck—who famously first got engaged in the aughts before breaking up days before their wedding—are on the brink of divorce. Some have speculated that Lopez’s consistent presence on social media has rankled Affleck in their relationship.
In a documentary accompanying Lopez’s self-funded musical film This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, Affleck expressed reluctance to fully embrace his wife’s vision for the film, which involved giving her collaborators access to a trove of love letters exchanged between Affleck and Lopez.
Now, in the new interview with Hart, Affleck first alludes briefly to Lopez in an aside to the comedian. “My wife will tell you, I like to talk,” he says, in a cut before a commercial break.
Affleck then tells Hart that his kids—he shares Violet, Seraphina and Samuel with ex-wife Jennifer Garner—are excellent at detecting his vulnerabilities and using them to poke fun at him.
“My daughter is always throwing out titles to her autobiography,” Affleck explained. “We went somewhere with [Lopez]—I can’t remember because she’s so famous, and she creates this—people love her, and she really represents something important to people,” Affleck says. “[To me,] People are like, ‘Hey, I like your movie,’ and then they’re like ‘AAAHHHH! J-LO!,’” he yelled. “It’s amazing, you know what I mean?”
“I think it was when we rolled through Times Square,” he continues. “We get out of the car, we were going to a play, and I was like, ‘Fuck it, babe, we’re going to be late, we gotta walk a block and a half.’ [Lopez] was like, ‘Alright,’ she didn’t say shit.”
“We get out with her, all the kids, through Times Square, and the shit was like fuckin’ bananas,” Affleck says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ There was a lady, she was smoking weed, in a full purple skintight suit—she’s a heavy lady—and she starts running backwards filming, going ‘J-LO!!’ Like a herald, that then gets everyone else, and then all the tourists come in.”
“Then we’ve got our five kids, it’s me and Jen and what feels like hundreds of people, and they’re all screaming. And my daughter just turns to me and goes, ‘J-Lo Was My Stepmother,’” Affleck continues. “And I was like, alright that’s a good title.”
Affleck also makes reference to the steady stream of paparazzi photographs of him looking grumpy. While some have assessed the photos and lately concluded that he must be unhappy in his marriage to Lopez, Affleck pushes back on that narrative here.
Explaining why he slightly preferred directing movies to acting to Hart, Affleck begins, “I’m also a little bit shy. I don’t like a lot of attention. This is why people see me and they’re like, ‘Why is this dude always mad?’ Because someone had their camera sticking in my face, and I’m like, OK, here we go.”
“You have resting bitch face,” Hart jokes
“Bitch? Now,” Affleck responded, with mock outrage. “I have resting hard face. People are projecting onto me something that I don’t feel about myself at all.”
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