Ben Affleck has some thoughts about his "Sad Affleck" meme from years ago, and he's not thrilled. He's also not sad.
"I got to a place where [the public perception] was so different from who I am," he told the Los Angeles Times, "that I just stopped reading and stopped caring."
Back in 2016, Ben went viral while promoting "Batman v Superman." During one interview, Ben looked somewhat melancholy and his mind seemed to drift off as Henry Cavill spoke to a reporter. Seeing this, a fan set the interview to Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" and zoomed the camera close into Ben's face. Soon after, the meme/video went viral.
Nearly six years later, Ben admits to being concerned about how his children —Violet, 16, Seraphina, 13, and Samuel, 9 — would view the meme, which was intended to be lighthearted.
"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."
Ben, though, doesn't stew over the meme and notes that he got some solid advice from a therapist 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."
"I'm really happy now, and I feel great," he added. "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."