The Tender Bar star Ben Affleck on figuring out Batman, and life

Ben Affleck would love to win awards this week for The Tender Bar but he’s already found fulfilment, thanks to a few life-defining rules.

George Clooney (L) and Ben Affleck arrive for The Tender Bar premiere at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Picture: AFP

Ben Affleck is philosophical about the prospect of picking up a best supporting actor Golden Globe or Critics Choice award next week for his role in The Tender Bar.

After a long career with plenty of ups and downs as an actor, writer, producer and director, he knows that awards aren’t everything.

But as a creative person who craves recognition and a human being with an ego, he appreciates that they aren’t nothing either.

“I’m in an entertainment form that is rooted in the process of standing on a stage in front of people – and at the end of it you want them to clap for you, right?,” he says of his nominations for the awards, both of which take place on Monday morning, Australian time.

“It is an audience-based art form and it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Any rewards or kind words, particularly now when there is a value to the currency of snark and negativity, it feels nice and is rewarding.”

Affleck certainly has form in the awards department, having won a screenwriting Oscar with his great mate Matt Damon for Good Will Hunting, as well as a best picture Oscar for the 2012 political thriller Argo, which he also directed and starred in. The latter award was shared with George Clooney, who is the director of The Tender Bar, a coming-of-age drama based on Pulitzer Prize-winning writer J.R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name.

Ben Affleck and Tye Sheridan in a scene from The Tender Bar.

Affleck says that “the luckiest thing that can happen to you as an actor is to have a great script with a great director fall out of the sky” and he didn’t have to think too hard about signing up to play the key role of Uncle Charlie when his old friend Clooney came knocking.

“For me the reward of this movie was the experience itself,” he says.

Affleck’s Uncle Charlie in The Tender Bar is a surrogate father figure to the memoir’s narrator, played at different ages by Daniel Ranieri, Tye Sheridan, and Ron Livingston. Moehringer’s real dad is a deadbeat radio DJ and drunk, who abandoned him to be raised by his mother and her unconventional extended family.

Uncle Charlie, who runs a local bar, is a well-read, streetwise straight-shooter and selflessly supportive of his sister’s grand plans for his nephew to get an education at the prestigious Yale University. There are echoes of Affleck’s breakthrough role as Chuckie in Good Will Hunting and the actor says he felt that Uncle Charlie could have been that character 25 years down the road. He also saw shades of his own father.

Ben Affleck says his character in The Tender Bar reminds him of his own father.

“My father was a bartender in a working people’s bar in the 1980s,” he says. “He was very well read and had strong feelings about elitism and education. So, I had a lot to draw from.”

Uncle Charlie also lives by a strict code, which he calls “the manly sciences” and tries to impart to his impressionable nephew the rules by which he should live and treat women. Affleck looks a little surprised when asked for his own life lessons – “I haven’t really codified that yet” – but nevertheless has a stab.

It’s hardly surprising it’s a complicated question given that Affleck has lived the past 25 years in the harsh public gaze.

His early romances with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez (rekindled this year) made him paparazzi fodder and his 13-year marriage to Jennifer Garner, with whom he has three children, was also marked by his continuing battles with depression, anxiety and a lack of sobriety.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the Los Angeles premiere of The Tender Bar last month. Picture: Amy Sussman/Getty Images

“Really, I have found that life has gotten simpler for me in a sense,” he says.

“You figure out what’s important to you and in what order. So, it’s my kids, my relationship and my work. And you figure out what kind of person you can live with and you can respect because the only root of self-esteem is actually esteeming the self, which means doing estimable things.

“That means not hurting people, not lying, having integrity, being able to be relied on, being honest, having the capacity to make a genuine apology when you make a mistake so you can repair the rupture that you have created. And helping other people – being available to love and be present for others in a selfless way. I think that’s the goal and what I aspire to.

“Some days I do better than others. I just made it up right there – I may revise it later.”

Ben Affleck says his farewell performance as Batman in the coming Flash movie is his best yet.

Having seemingly hung up his cape after what he describes as a “very, very, very hard experience” on the troubled Justice League, Affleck will return to the role of Batman in The Flash later this year.

His experiences with director Joss Whedon and the pressures of the high-profile role led to a relapse in his drinking and he pulled out of a planned solo film he was due to write, direct and star in. But he says his experiences doing reshoots for Zack Snyder’s Justice League as well as his time on The Flash “put a really nice finish on my experience with that character”.

“I have never said this – this is hot off the presses – but maybe my favourite scenes in terms of Batman and the interpretation of Batman that I have done, were in the Flash movie,” he says. “I hope they maintain the integrity of what we did because I thought it was great and really interesting – different, but not in a way that is incongruent with the character.

“Who knows? Maybe they will decide that it doesn’t work, but when I went and did it, it was really fun and really, really satisfying and encouraging and I thought, ‘Wow – I think I have finally figured it out’.”

The Tender Bar streams on Amazon Prime Video January 7

Originally published as The Tender Bar star Ben Affleck on figuring out Batman, and life