Ben Affleck may be amused with becoming a meme, but his one concern is no laughing matter.
Back in 2016, the actor—and his melancholy expression during the Batman v Superman press tour—become a viral sensation. And looking back today, it's just one example of the tremendous attention (good and bad) he's received.
"I got to a place where [the public perception] was so different from who I am," he recently told the Los Angeles Times, "that I just stopped reading and stopped caring."
And although the context surrounding his meme was lighthearted, Ben worried about what his kids Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13, and Samuel, 9—who he shares wth ex Jennifer Garner—would think.
"As my kids got older and started seeing the internet themselves, that's the difficult part," he said. "Even the ‘Sad Affleck' meme—that was funny to me. I mean, there's nobody who hasn't felt that way at a junket. But then my kids see it and I think, ‘Oh, are they going to think their dad is fundamentally sad or they have to worry about me?' That's really tough."
But, as Ben noted, he's been able to move forward with less worry, thanks to advice a therapist gave him in the early 2000s.
"I was really struggling," he said. "People were just writing vicious, awful, hateful stuff about me all the time and it really started to affect me. The therapist said, ‘What I find about criticism is that if you can look at it honestly and take in what resonates with you, then the rest of it you can let go.' And that was a process that got me into directing and gave me the confidence to start doing that."
Today, Ben—who has been open about his personal life including his subsequent divorce and journey to sobriety—is in a much better space.
"I'm really happy now, and I feel great," the superstar, who reignited his relationship with Jennifer Lopez in 2021, told the publication. "I'm not perfect. I don't do everything right. But I wake up and feel good about the choices I made the day before, and if I don't, I address it right away. I've got to hope and believe that people will still like the movies I make if I'm not in the midst of something they think of as agonizing."