Ben Affleck pictured in 2023Ben Affleck pictured in 2023

Ben Affleck is opening up about his sobriety – and why he almost wishes fewer people knew about it. 

In one of the Oscar winner’s most recent movies, The Way Back, he plays a recovering addict.

While Ben has spoken candidly about his own issues with addiction in the past, he told GQ Magazine in an interview published this week that he “maybe underestimated the degree to which” his alcoholism and recovery would become a talking point going forward. 

“I didn’t have any ambitions to be the national spokesman for recovering alcoholics,” he said. 

“And not because I have any shame with it or anything,” Ben added. “I just find that, I’ve been sober for more than five years, it’s just not something that is at the forefront of my mind. It’s not the central preoccupation of my life.

“But at the time, it was something that I was definitely wrestling with and thinking about.” 

The Argo star said that if he “could have,” he “would’ve kept the fact that I’m sober anonymous”. 

“I think it works better that way. And I didn’t ask for that to become something people knew about,” he said.  “But I can’t complain about it either. I understood doing this job and doing this life, if something happened like that, people were going to know about it, and they did.

“And I have arrived at a place where I think of that experience as part of my life in authentically grateful ways, whereas I didn’t think such a thing was possible before. So that sort of is what it is.” 

Ben released a public statement in 2018, after his third stint in rehab, in which he said that “battling any addiction is a lifelong and difficult struggle”. 

“Because of that, one is never really in or out of treatment. It is a full-time commitment,” he wrote at the time. 

In 2021, Ben told The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast he’d “been sober for a while now” and that he feels “as healthy and good as I’ve ever felt”. 

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