Ben Affleck did not dress it up. Sitting with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he pointed straight at Justice League and called what happened on that movie the lowest stretch of his career.
“The experience of Justice League for me was so so negative for lots of different reasons,” Affleck said, pointing to where he was personally at the time and to the tragedy that hit the production.
Director Zack Snyder stepped away in 2017 after his daughter Autumn died. Warner Bros. brought in Joss Whedon, and the film was largely remade in reshoots. Affleck says the way Snyder’s exit was handled still bothers him.
“Boy, that was shitty, him being taken off that movie and the reshoots that we did. If you want the low point of my career, it was that.”
His bigger takeaway was watching a studio at odds with its own filmmaker, which he called the mistake that doomed the movie. He also said he was genuinely happy when Snyder finally got to release his own cut of the film in 2021.
Horowitz also got Affleck to open up about how he found his Batman voice. He built it off Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the older Bruce Wayne who is gray, beat up and drawn to look like Marlon Brando.
A regular voice in the cowl would have played farcical, so Affleck went with a Batman who sounds exhausted and gravelly, and he liked that it was his own voice instead of a modifier built into the suit.
He carried in one more lesson, from Tim Burton telling Jack Nicholson back on the 1989 Batman: let the suit do the acting. Affleck is out promoting Animals, the thriller he directed and stars in alongside Kerry Washington, which landed on Netflix on October 9. Nine years later, the Batman questions are still the ones doing the work.