Ben Affleck still has nothing but positive words to say about his ex-wife Jennifer Lopez.
“I’m biased. I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for what she can do,” Affleck, 54, told Variety in an interview published Wednesday, October 7, when asked about Lopez’s awards season snubs for her roles in Hustlers and Kiss of the Spiderwoman. “What I’ve found with awards is that sometimes the degree of commercial success for things doesn’t always correlate to my taste.”
He continued, “It’s a part of this weird, subjective business that people bring a lot of their own stuff to. I don’t always think the right person won the right award. But guess what? I don’t think you die and go to heaven, and God says, ‘This was the actual best picture in 1986.’ At the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of people voting on movie prizes.”
In addition to seeing what Lopez, 57, can do as an actress, Affleck is equally in awe of her musical and social media accomplishments.
“Artists should be making money. You see it massively in the music business. People — either tacitly or explicitly — are expected to make money elsewhere,” he told Variety. “Now you’ve got your social media identity. You work to develop that. I’ve seen both Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Garner do amazing jobs cultivating and accruing value in those spaces. Don’t think that’s not real work. I couldn’t do it.”
Affleck was married to Garner, 54, from 2005 to 2015, later marrying Lopez in 2022 decades after their broken engagement in the early aughts. The Animals star and Lopez ultimately separated in 2024, finalizing their divorce the following year. (Affleck and Garner are parents of three, while Lopez shares two kids with ex-husband Marc Anthony.)
“Jennifer Lopez is spectacular, great to my kids, great ongoing relationship with them,” Affleck previously told Entertainment Tonight in April 2025. “I love her kids. They’re wonderful. She’s [an] enormously important, tremendous person of a lot of integrity who I adore and am grateful to.”
While neither Affleck nor Lopez have revealed what led to them calling it quits after two years of marriage, the “On the Floor” singer once claimed it felt like her “whole f***ing world exploded” when the duo went their separate ways.
“The work is figuring yourself out. It’s looking back at the feelings underneath and the belief systems that we have about ourselves that make us make certain choices and create certain patterns in our life,” Lopez told Interview in 2024 of navigating her new chapter. “And so, when you get to a point where you think that you’ve learned the lessons, and then it blows up in your face again, you realize, ‘OK, I haven’t, so what is it that I need to look at right now?’ I would say, never stop looking inward, because it’s so easy to blame everybody else.”
