Ben Affleck Explores Marriage and Personal Pain in Animals

Ben Affleck draws on decades of life experience to portray a marriage unraveling under pressure in Animals, a Netflix kidnapping thriller co-starring Kerry Washington. The actor, who directs and co-wrote the film, explores how personal pain, regret and vulnerability can help performers portray emotionally complicated relationships with greater authenticity.

Netflix scheduled Animals to begin streaming October 9. Affleck plays Mark Kimball, an independent politician running to become mayor of Los Angeles whose life deteriorates after his son is kidnapped. As Mark attempts to manage the crisis, tensions escalate between him and his wife, Abby, played by Washington.

One of the film's most intense scenes features the couple confronting each other at home. Their argument exposes hidden truths, accumulated resentment and unresolved grievances, placing their marriage under severe emotional strain.

Affleck said growing older has given him a deeper understanding of the emotions required for such performances.

"This is going to sound a little woo-woo, but as I've gotten older, living more life means having joy and having pain and making mistakes and having regrets. What I've learned to understand more is kind of where those feelings are and be able to access and touch them, because I've just had more life experience." Affleck said.

The actor also connected the portrayal of a deteriorating relationship to the emotional weight of losing someone important. His understanding of that experience informed his approach to the characters' conflict.

"When a relationship that's really important to you is ending, if you've been through it, you sort of know how it feels, and you understand the gravity of what it is," Affleck said.

Beyond the kidnapping storyline and its political backdrop, Animals examines marriage as both an emotional partnership and a shared responsibility involving children and finances. Affleck said those overlapping obligations interested him as a subject for the film.

He described his interest in examining how marriage has evolved from a largely contractual arrangement into a relationship in which romantic love often occupies a central role.

"really interested"

Affleck also discussed the historical role of financial arrangements in marriage, including the use of dowries when couples might have known little about each other.

"literally, dowry, all that stuff," Affleck said.

He contrasted that historical arrangement with the contemporary emphasis on romantic connection.

"was sort of incidental," Affleck said.

Affleck said the emotional and practical demands of marriage make it a significant challenge in modern life.

"the central challenge of life in a lot of ways." Affleck said.

For the filmmaker, the central dramatic question involved how much vulnerability partners can tolerate while trying to maintain each other's attraction and respect. The film explores what happens when a couple reaches a point at which concealing uncomfortable truths no longer seems worthwhile.

"There's a tension between what we want to show our partners. We want them to be attracted to us and to see attractive things about us, and we don't want to show them things that are not attractive. I wanted to tell a story about a couple that got to the place where they’re only really able to be totally and utterly honest with one another when they felt they had nothing to lose.

And then propose an interesting thesis based on that. That felt, to me, like really rich ground." Affleck said.

Although Mark is a prominent Los Angeles political figure dealing with public scrutiny and personal turmoil, Affleck said the character's circumstances do not directly reproduce his own relationship history. The actor's marriages to Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez, along with their divorces, have received extensive public attention.

Affleck said he and Washington developed a shared backstory and conflicts for their characters. He acknowledged that personal experiences helped him understand the material, while cautioning against assuming that a performance directly mirrors an actor's private life.

"I know there's a tendency to watch actors – particularly when you have a lot of things you associate with the actor, that's sort of our baggage – and sort of project those things onto them. The truth is, really, it's not as correlative as you would think, except for the sense that you've got to have lived life to be able to relive it authentically." Affleck said.

He said divorce involving children carries a particular emotional burden, providing a difficult experience for actors to approach without simply reproducing specific personal memories.

"The circumstance of divorce with children is facing something that's excruciatingly painful," Affleck said.

Affleck explained that actors must find an emotional connection to a character's circumstances rather than rely on an exact match with events from their own lives.

"People can identify with that if they've been through it. And as an actor, it's your job to find something that's related to that. Weirdly, as an actor, if you actually think about the exact moments that correlate to the exact thing, it's too literal, and it sort of doesn't work." Affleck said.