Ben Affleck Says Jennifer Lopez Knows He’s ‘Guarded’ About Public Attention: ‘She’s Looking Out for Me’
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“She thinks that, because of experiences that I’ve had, I’ve become very guarded. And she’s right,” he said
Ben Affleck says wife Jennifer Lopez is correct about how he keeps his guard up with the public.
In a new cover story for The Hollywood Reporter published Thursday, Affleck, 50, revealed that Lopez, 53, “gave me a talk this morning before this interview” as he was asked why he stays away from social media while his wife posts often.
“She thinks that, because of experiences that I’ve had, I’ve become very guarded. And she’s right,” the actor-director said. “I view these things as land mines, where if you say one wrong thing, your career might be over.”
Affleck went on to recall a “really painful experience where I did an interview where I was really vulnerable,” during a December 2021 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, after which the actor said various outlets distorted his words while covering the interview until stories were published that were “actually the opposite of what I meant.”
After briefly rehashing the interview — and its fallout, recounting how he appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live to express his frustration and say comments from his radio appearance were taken out of context — the actor returned to advice his wife recently gave him.
“So she tells me today, ‘Relax, be yourself. Have fun. You’re actually a fun guy who is real and genuine and you just seem so serious.’ Do I seem serious?” he asked. “But as in many things, she’s really right.”
“And she loves me. She’s looking out for me. She’s trying to help me. So it’s like, maybe I ought to f—ing listen to her,” Affleck added.
Related:Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck’s Relationship Timeline
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Last year, Lopez told PEOPLE about rekindling her romance with Affleck years after they’d called off their engagement, saying this time they “had a little bit of fear” about attention on their relationship, recalling the circus that surrounded them the first time around. “Before we kind of put [our relationship] out there and we were naïve and it got a little trampled,” she said.
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This time, she said, “We both were like, ‘Wow, we’re so happy and we don’t want any of that to come into play again.’ We’re older now, we’re smarter, we have more experience, we’re at different places in our lives, we have kids now, and we have to be very conscious of those things. We’re so protective because it is such a beautiful time for all of us.”
In a video Lopez shared to Instagram in November, the singer and actress used a TikTok audio clip to deem her husband “the person that makes me the happiest I have ever been.”
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