Ben Affleck breaks silence on his divorce from Jennifer Lopez

Ben Affleck has opened up about his divorce from Jennifer Lopez for the first time.

Affleck spoke about the divorce in an interview with GQ published on March 25, when he was talking about how he presents himself to the public.

“My life is actually pretty drama-free,” Affleck said. “And so even if I have the same events that people have — I’m sure in your mind you’re thinking, Oh, well, you just got divorced. That’s not drama-free.

“And I understand that instinct, but all of this is pretty adult, and for all the sensational stuff that gets written, if somebody sat down and talked to me about it, and I said, ‘Well, this is really the experience,’ their eyes would glaze over with boredom,” he continued.

The interviewer said he was thinking about Lopez’s documentary, “The Greatest Love Story Never Told,” in which the premise was about the idea that Lopez and Affleck are private people but have public dimensions, and that Lopez was going to put more of herself and Affleck out there in the documentary.

Affleck’s response to the assertion was captured on camera, which the interviewer noted.

“Part of it was, ‘Okay, if I’m going to participate in this, I want to try to do it in an honest way and in a way that’s interesting.’ Because I thought it was an interesting examination,” Affleck told GQ.

“Like I mentioned to you before, there are a lot of people who I think have handled celebrity more adeptly and more adroitly than I have, Jennifer among them,” he continued. “My temperament is to be a little bit more reserved and private than hers.”

Affleck said that he and his ex-wife didn’t always have the same attitude toward fame.

“And so I thought, Oh, this is interesting because how do you reconcile that? Because exactly what you said is true. I love and support this person. I believe in them. They’re great. I want people to see that,” he said.

Affleck referenced a line he said in the documentary: “You don’t marry a ship captain and then say, ‘Well, I don’t like going out in the water.’”

“You’ve got to own what you knew going into any relationship,” he said. “And I think it’s important to say that wasn’t the cause of some major fracture. It’s not like you can watch that documentary and go, ‘Oh, now I understand the issues that these two had.’”

Affleck and the interviewer met again a few days later, and Affleck brought up his comments about Lopez again when asked how he felt about their previous conversation.

“Well, on the one hand there’s the first feeling, which is like, well, I hope I was clear about, when you asked me about Jen and the documentary and I talked about that and my sort of personal life a little bit, which I don’t mind doing as long as my actual feelings and intentions and beliefs are communicated, which I hope I was clear that really this is somebody I have a lot of respect for,” he said.

“And I get wanting to divine or explore the kind of differences in perspective that we have in terms of how a person feels comfortable approaching the line between public and private life,” he continued. “But I really hope that whatever you use doesn’t suggest that I have any negativity or judgment or anything regarding that. I have nothing but respect.”

Affleck said there can be a tendency to look at a breakup and want to identify “root causes.”

“But honestly, like I said, the truth is much more quotidian than probably people would believe or would be interesting,” he said.

The interviewer asked to clarify that there wasn’t one major thing that led to their breakup, which Affleck confirmed.

“Yeah, there’s no scandal, no soap opera, no intrigue,” he said. “The truth is, when you talk to somebody, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Well, there is no: ‘This is what happened.’ It’s just a story about people trying to figure out their lives and relationships in ways that we all sort of normally do.

“And as you get older, this is true for me, I assume it’s true for most people, there is no ‘So-and-so did this’ or ‘This was the big event.’ It’s really, it sounds more like a couple’s therapy session, which — you would tune out of someone else’s couple’s therapy after a while,” he added. “For one thing, you start going, ‘Okay, clearly this person has got these issues. Clearly they have these issues.’ And the reason I don’t want to share that is just sort of embarrassing. It feels vulnerable.”

Lopez, 55, filed for divorce from Affleck, 52, in August 2024, two years after they married. Lopez cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for their split, according to court documents obtained by TODAY.com.

Lopez addressed the divorce in an October 2024 Interview magazine piece, saying she was “excited” to be single again.

“I’m not looking for anybody,” she noted, saying that the summer of 2024 was a lesson in learning she had to be “good on (her) own.”

Lopez and Affleck first met and got engaged in 2002, but broke up in 2004, before reconnecting in 2021 after multiple engagements and marriages to other people. The pair finalized their divorce in January 2025.