For years after Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke up, it was treated as common knowledge that the relationship had almost ruined the actor’s career. “If I have a regret, it was doing the music video,” said Affleck in 2008, after he made his directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone. He was referring to his appearance in 2002’s “Jenny From the Block,” which featured Affleck and Lopez being surveilled by paparazzi while trying to live their fabulous lives, something they were also doing for real.
Did Bennifer hurt Affleck’s career? The calculations that go into fame have become so transparent in the 17 years since that relationship that for Affleck to dismiss the media circus as beneath his dignity feels naïve and a little self-serving. But one thing is definitely true: In a year when Affleck appears in three films (if you count “the Snyder Cut”), more people can name whom he’s dating than what he’s starring in. In July, the same month that Affleck informed the Times Magazine thahave both assiduously tried to maintain our privacy,” Affleck was photographed lounging on a yacht in the sun with Lopez, with whom he reunited earlier this year, his hand on the slopes of his lover’s critically acclaimed derrière. It was either a deliberate recreation of the most famous moment in the music video Affleck had previously renounced or an absentminded gesture of affection made by someone who had forgotten all about that.
The uneasy relationship Affleck has with celebrity owes a lot to the level of invasive scrutiny he’s dealt with steadily over the years. The ups and downs of his life, the high-profile relationships, the family, the divorce, and the struggles with alcoholism have been chronicled in vivid, excruciating detail by the press. Bennifer marked the beginning of an intense public interest in Affleck’s life, and it’s undoubtedly the force that has kept him in the cultural consciousness and, more recently, made him an object of internet standom.
Straw-poll a group of strangers, and they’re unlikely to approach anything close to a consensus as to what constitutes Affleck’s best-known work. He is not a performer who vanishes into roles. He is always inescapably himself, which is not in itself a bad thing. It is an essential aspect of being a movie star, a separate quality from acting entirely. But he is a movie star who has never been known for a definitive movie, though he’s been acting since he was a kid and has been a force to be reckoned with since 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which he and Damon wrote together back when they were two bright young men from Boston (well, Cambridge). He has played Tom Clancy characters, corrupt politicians, single dads, romantic leads, criminals, multiple superheroes, and the main role in a Best Picture winner he himself directed. And yet the first image of Affleck that comes to mind is almost certainly one taken by a paparazzo.
It’s not that Affleck is bad at what he does so much as he has seldom had roles that make use of his distinctive set of qualities — the almost absurdly square jaw, the height, the handsomeness, as well as the touch of a smirk, the hint of unreliability that can come across as discordant when he plays the hero. If it feels like Affleck’s greatest role to date has been as himself, the reluctant celebrity, it’s because his pap pics are rich with narrative and unfiltered emotion. He has a fascinating expressiveness that he can’t seem to help offscreen. The wild virality of Affleck’s most famous snapshots comes from the fact that they capture a side of him his movies rarely do, showcasing an unusual level of masculine vulnerability.
In 2018, when shooting the brawny Netflix heist movie
n Hawaii, an irresistible photo of Affleck on the beach with his co-stars started making the rounds. In addition to demonstrating that a phoenix back tattoo that Affleck had previously stated was fake and for a role was apparently real and earnestly obtained, the picture caught the actor in a pensive pose. As s Naomi Fry wrote that year, the way the towel fell around his mid-section recalled “a shy teen at the local pool.” Affleck felt the need to respond to Fry, tweeting that he was “doing just fine. Thick skin bolstered by garish tattoos” — a self-deprecating reply that also seemed to imply that regarding him as a public figure was a transgression.
The whole appeal of these photos is that they invite readings of an inaccessible inner life — hence the Tumblr account dedicated to all the times when he’s looked sad. The feeling reached new heights in 2015, after Affleck and his then-wife Jennifer Garner separated. The pap pics that started emerging, that year and the next, were a kind of negative bookend to the bacchanalia of fabulousness created for “Jenny From the Block.” Affleck’s marriage was ending, and he was the featured player in some of the most Getting Divorced photos of all time. He was photographed looking miserable on the Dumbo ride at Disney World, cradling a golden-retriever puppy, and vaping in a car as though the electronic cigarette he clutched were providing him with the breath of life. Whatever the context in which each moment was taking place, as a series they told the story of someone whose life was falling apart with astounding clarity.
A 2016 photo of the actor smoking a cigarette in London, where he had spent his 44th birthday with Garner and their children, was quickly detached from the time and place in which it was taken to become the stuff of memes. It was a perfect encapsulation of the feeling of stepping out from a rough workplace or a shitty party and letting your game face drop. It’s there in the exhausted tilt of his head, the closed eyes, the pose of a body slowly returning to something more recognizably mortal after months of impossible s
uperhero shape.
One of the killings that sparked racial justice protests last year is back in the national spotlight with a trial set to begin Monday in Brunswick, Ga. Three white men are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old Black man who was shot and killed as he was jogging down a residential street on Feb. 23, 2020, after being chased by pickup trucks.
She's standing on a street corner in the Satilla Shores subdivision just outside Brunswick. It's a neighborhood tucked between waterways on the Georgia coast. Towering trees form a canopy over mostly brick ranch-style homes. A sign in one front yard declares "We Run With Ahmaud."
Arbery, a former high school athlete, lived about 2 miles from here, just across U.S. Route 17. Brooks says this was one of his regular running paths because he could stay off the highway.
"There he goes right now. Running down the street"
But some residents had grown suspicious of Arbery after repeatedly spotting him entering a new home construction site. They suspected him of recent break-ins, although police had not linked him to any.
On the day of the shooting, defendant Travis McMichael calls 911 to report there's a guy in a house under construction. "There he goes right now," he says on the recording. "Running down the street."
The dispatcher says she'll send police but asks, "I just need to know what he was doing wrong?"
Arbery was unarmed, but Travis McMichael had a shotgun.
A second 911 call was made by Travis' father, Gregory McMichael, also a defendant.
"There's a Black male running down the street," he says. Then he yells "Stop! Dammit stop! Travis!"
Seconds later you hear three shotgun blasts.
Theawanza Brooks says she often imagines what that moment must have been like for her nephew, trapped with no one to help him. Now she's bracing herself to hear defendants argue in court that this all happened because they suspected him in neighborhood thefts — that it was a legal citizen's arrest gone tragically awry because Arbery fought back.
"Even if you steal something, nobody has the decision to make as far as being the judge, jury and executioner," says Brooks.
Judge, jury and executioner
At trial, Travis McMichael, 35, Gregory McMichael, 65, and another neighbor,
Particularly in the Black community, if you were found to have killed someone," he says, "you're getting handcuffed and you're getting booked."
Perry is running for mayor of Brunswick in the aftermath of Arbery's killing. He's part of a crowded field of candidates that reflects a wider political awakening.
He says this case is a prime example of why many Black citizens see the justice system as tainted.
Relationships of privilege
Perry and others, including federal prosecutors, say Arbery's killing was racially motivated — that he was profiled as a Black man running through a predominantly white neighborhood.
Defense lawyers will reject that argument at trial, according to attorney Robert Rubin, who represents the gunman, Travis McMichael.
"There's a man in the neighborhood who doesn't belong in the neighborhood. Not because he's Black," Rubin says. "He doesn't belong there because he's at least trespassing in a house he doesn't belong in."
Rubin argues that that suspicion amounts to probable cause under Georgia's citizen's arrest law at the time, and that the McMichaels were simply trying to detain Arbery until police got there. But when Arbery resisted, he says, Travis McMichael acted in self-defense.
"They're literally locked together — Mr. Arbery has one hand on the gun and one hand he's punching Travis in the head," says Rubin. "And Travis knows 'if I lose possession of this gun, I'm dead.' And so he fires the gun. Mr. Arbery does not stop coming at him, and eventually he kills Mr. Arbery."
The struggle was captured on cellphone video by the third suspect — William Bryan, who goes by the name Roddie.
"Without Roddie Bryan there would be no case," says his lawyer Kevin Gough.
Bryan was in the second pickup truck chasing Arbery. Gough says his client had nothing to do with the shooting and has cooperated fully with the investigation.
"Roddie Bryant did nothing on the day in question that any patriotic American wouldn't have done," argues Gough. "He saw an individual that he didn't know running by, followed by a motor vehicle that he did, in a community that was on edge."
He says it's wrong to cast this case in light of the nation's broader struggle for equal justice.
It feels like these folks are being pursued, punished, prosecuted, however you describe it, in a sense or a way of atoning for the sins of law enforcement real or perceived in the administration of Justice," Gough says.
Many do see this trial in the context of other prominent racial justice cases that have had a mixed bag of verdicts — Ahmaud Arbery as yet an
Can we sustain any of this momentum toward true equity, equality and justice?" he asks. "Or are we just stuck in a cycle of some people get it and some people don't at all? It depends. The American Constitution should not be a parchment of 'it depends.'"
For Henderson, the case is also personal. His son worked with Ahmaud Arbery at a fast food restaurant when they were teenagers.
"It took a lot from me emotionally," he says. "You're pulling together all of these components. You understa
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