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Ben Affleck, 54, on What Losing Both Parents Taught Him About Life
His mother’s choices and his unfinished business with his father have sharpened his focus on time with his children
3-minute read
Ben Affleck and his mother, Chris, attend a 1998 pre-Oscar party in Beverly Hills, California. He said that his parents’ deaths in 2026 made him reevaluate how he spent his time.
Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
Key takeaways
- Losing his parents two months apart prompted Ben Affleck to reconsider how he wants to spend the rest of his life.
- He reflected on what his parents taught him and the relationships that remain unresolved.
- Time with his children is a priority as he balances work and family.
Actor, writer and director Ben Affleck lost both parents this year. At 54, he’s thinking about what they left him and what he still has time to do.
“That’s what we get. We get this much time, and it’s a reminder not to put anything off or fix it later,” he told Variety in an interview published Oct. 7. “It’s more about how you show up every day with everybody else.”
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Affleck is promoting Animals, the thriller he directed and stars in, which premieres on Netflix and in select theaters Oct. 9. In an episode of GQ’s One More Question podcast released Oct. 6, he said his father, Timothy, died in April and his mother, Chris, in June.
The losses brought different kinds of reflection. He told GQ that he and his father had a complicated relationship and had not been close in his final years. He declined to discuss the reasons. “Stuff you haven’t fixed in life stays unfixed,” he said.
With his mother, Affleck told Variety, he had been able to have conversations he once couldn’t imagine.
“We got to have this nice adult relationship; we were really honest,” he said.
Sorting through her belongings brought another realization: “Going through her stuff, you see this woman lived an entire lifetime that had nothing to do with me.”
Her response to her pancreatic cancer also stayed with him. She weighed treatment against the life she wanted to keep living.
“She had this cancer diagnosis, and a great lesson was the proactive way she said, ‘I’m going to make a decision about how much treatment I want to do and how that’s going to impact my life,’ ” he told Variety.
She chose to stay near her friends rather than move to Los Angeles, where Affleck and his children live. She shoveled her own walk. But, he said, she would board a plane for any of her five grandchildren.
Affleck shares three children with ex-wife Jennifer Garner: Violet, 20, Fin, 17, and Samuel, 14. Keeping his work in Los Angeles allows him to be there for them. He and Garner have joint custody. (His brother, Casey Affleck, also has two sons.)
“I’m divorced, I have shared custody and I don’t want to miss these years. My kids are here, and their life is flying by,” he told Variety.
On the GQ podcast, he described a decision that put those priorities into practice: passing on a directing project that would have taken him to New Jersey during his middle child’s senior year of high school. He also took a family trip after his mother died.
He acknowledged that many working parents cannot choose to stay close to home. He wants to make use of that freedom while his children still live with him every other week.
“And that whole phase of life where you live with them and you’re their parent and you have that kind of relationship is over, and it never, ever comes back,” he told GQ.
When his son wants to play basketball, Affleck said, he wants to put down his phone. He would rather leave a message unanswered than look back on times he was too busy to be available.
“You look back on your life, it’s like, Where did you spend your days, and who were you around?” he said. “That principally defines your experience on Earth.”
Affleck’s decision to put down his phone when his son wants to hang out is one way to make their time together count. Slowing down instead of rushing through life is another, says Alex Snider, author of Sometimes You Should Be Late: The Quiet Rebellion of Slowing Down in a World Obsessed with Speed.
“I believe our relationship with time is central to happiness,” says Snider. “When we rush, feel behind or sense that life is slipping away, we become reactive. Our brain’s primitive fear response takes over. When we slow down, we regain access to a wiser, kinder, happier version of ourselves.”
The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.
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