Ben Affleck gets raw and candid about his parents' death and divorce

Ben Affleck has always maintained a private life, especially when it comes to emotional subjects. After losing his parents this year, he did not share a statement, but he's opening up about the loss for the first time. 

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During a conversation with his Animals co-star, Kerry Washington, on her podcast, Street You Grew Up On, what began as a conversation about his childhood neighborhood turned into a deeply personal discussion about grief, divorce, and the things he is only now beginning to understand about his parents.

“I feel like I’m in, like, therapy,” Affleck joked as Washington asked him to revisit his early years. But he soon explained why talking about that period of his life feels different now.

“My parents just died, both of them,” he shared, revealing that their deaths occurred in April and June. “So, I’ve been just like, you know, not just now or anything, but it’s sort of a big thing.”

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The losses have made Ben reconsider his upbringing and the people who shaped it, particularly his mother, whose devotion to her children he says he has come to appreciate on a deeper level.

“I’ve certainly learned to sort of even more deeply appreciate my mom and really value and see what she did and the sacrifice and commitment that she made and how complete it was,” he said.

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That means recognizing that the woman he knew primarily as his mother, Christopher Anne Affleck, had an entire life, with her own ambitions and dreams, long before he was born.

Ben Affleck reflects on his mother’s life before motherhood

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One of the most emotional parts of the conversation came when Ben described discovering letters his mother had written to her own parents when she was younger. 

Reading them after her death gave him a glimpse of a woman he realized he had never fully known in that way.

She had been a young woman with ambitions, questions about her future and a desire to make a difference. Ben recalled her considering careers such as social work and teaching, as well as her interest in protests and traveling to Mississippi.

“First of all, this young woman, you know, full of life and ambition and dreams,” he said. “It was really fascinating.”

But it was the realization that his mother had lived an entire life before raising him and Casey that stayed with him. “This woman had her own whole life for 30 years that had zero to do with me,” he said.

The Batman star explained that, as a child, he had always known his mother loved him unconditionally. That security, however, also meant he viewed her primarily through the role she played in his life, rather than as a person with her own hopes and experiences.

“All I knew was a person who just made me and my brother the absolute most important center of her life,” he said. “I just thought, like, this woman’s amazing,” he recalled. “She could do anything.”

He recalled her coming home after a full day of teaching and doing everything around the home. "And there I was, probably a pain in the ass, like outside, didn’t want to come [in] and complain. Whatever it was, you know. And hard to wrangle, me and my brother," he said. "It really struck me, really for the first time, that I had taken for granted [what she did], probably in a way that she wants, in a way I want my children to take for granted.”

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His mother graduated from Harvard and spent 35 years teaching in public schools before retiring in 2008. She taught literacy classes in Mississippi, later protested the Vietnam War and embraced the counterculture movement of the 1960s. 

Decades later, she volunteered on Barack Obama's presidential campaign and became involved with advocacy surrounding water justice in Palestine after traveling to the region in 2009.

She died on June 2, 2026, at age 83, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. 

Ben opens up about his father’s alcoholism and his parents’ divorce

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While Ben's memories of his mother were filled with admiration, his recollections of his childhood home were more complicated.

His father, Timothy Byers Affleck, struggled with alcoholism and had difficulty maintaining steady employment during Ben's childhood. 

Ben described years of tension at home, recalling arguments between his parents and his father's growing resentment. “He’d drink too much,” Ben said. “Angry, resentful.”

He also remembered his father frequently falling out with people at work. As a child, he began noticing his father would blame other people for problems that seemed to follow him from one job to the next.

The family eventually reached a breaking point. When Ben was 11, his parents sat him and Casey down at the table and told them they were getting divorced.

“I remember thinking I should try to look sad,” he said. “I thought, ‘Can I try to cry? Should I be sad?’ But I was so happy.”

Ben said he wasn't mature enough to understand what the separation meant for his mother. “This is a problem,” he remembered thinking. “And there’s all this conflict. And it was clear to me that, like, I want this to be over with.”

His parents' divorce was finalized in 1984, when he was around 11 or 12. Chris went on to raise Ben and Casey primarily in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Timothy continued to struggle with alcoholism before eventually pursuing sobriety. 

Timothy died in April 2026 at age 76, two months before Chris's death. 

Rest in peace.