Ben Affleck Sees "Collective Disappointment" With American Politics, Rules Out Running for Office
Ben Affleck plays a man running for mayor of Los Angeles in his new thriller "Animals." His cast thinks he should do it for real. He is not interested.At the film's Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday night, Affleck was asked about the idea of a genuine run for elected office, and he dismissed it with a crack and then a critique. "Maybe they hate me," he joked, before turning serious about why the job holds no appeal. "We don't ask the question of what are your qualifications to hold public office any longer," he said. "It's, 'You wanna join the circus? Who's the biggest carny?'"The sharper line came next. "I think that there is, whatever side of the aisle you're on, one of the interesting things that people can agree on is a collective disappointment with the way that American politics has trended," Affleck said. "There's nobody alive now who thinks, hey, we're really doing it right and things are going great and I love this political system. And that's a problem."He went further, describing modern campaigns as a fundraising treadmill stripped of substance. "It's just about money, raising money, it's just about playing a sort of adolescent game of who can make fun of the other person better or be more reductive and stupid about something rather than actually trying to talk about the issues," he said. His conclusion was blunt: "Selfishly, I just see what a difficult grind of a job it is and I'd rather make movies about it."The comments carry weight because Affleck is not a casual observer of politics. He is a longtime Democratic activist who supported the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. This is someone who has knocked on doors and written checks, not someone discovering the subject for a press tour.His "Animals" co-stars, meanwhile, are happy to volunteer him. Kerry Washington, who plays Affleck's wife in the film, said the cast has been lobbying him. "We keep telling him that he should, but he doesn't want to," Washington said. "You know, we're in a place in our politics right now where anything is possible, but I would hope that the people who are running for office want to be there and he has been very explicit in saying that he doesn't want to run for office." Luis Gerardo Méndez, who plays an undocumented Mexican immigrant pulled into the orbit of Affleck's mayoral hopeful, was more direct: "I would definitely vote for him. Go Ben Affleck! He's smart and sexy, that's all you need.""Animals," which Affleck directed and co-wrote, arrives October 9 on Netflix and in select theaters. The timing of his comments is no accident. He has spent the last two years playing variations on American power and its discontents, and the film gives him a fictional mayoral campaign to hide behind while saying what he actually thinks.For actors, the interesting part is the lane Affleck is choosing. In the post-Trump era, the celebrity-to-candidate pipeline is a proven route, and an A-lister with his name recognition and political resume could walk it. He is explicitly refusing it. Instead he is positioning himself as the commentator class of Hollywood: influential, opinionated, and deliberately outside the arena. That is a calculation more stars are making now, that the currency of cultural influence spends better than a campaign does, and that running for office means surrendering the one thing a movie star cannot afford to lose, which is being liked by half the country at a time.
