Originally published September 17, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
Since the controversial casting of Ben Affleck as The Dark Knight in Batman vs. Superman, we’ve heard the opinions of just about everyone in Hollywood, not to mention the legion of fans outraged over his appointment as Christian Bale’s successor. Well, now Affleck himself has broken his silence, offering a few words about his role in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel during an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
“It’s so awesome, I’m so excited. They called me up and said ‘Do you want to do this?’, and I’m like, ‘I’m not 25 man are you sure?’. So they said to come down and we’ll show you what we’re doing, and it was incredible. Zack Snyder has this incredible take on it. Obviously we can’t do what Christian Bale did, those movies are amazing, so he wants to do something different but still in keeping with that. So I thought this is a brilliant way to do this and I really know how to hook into this. And I said, ‘Okay I want to do it’, and the people from the studio were like ‘we’re thrilled, we’re so excited, but listen, we want to talk to you because people go through this process and it can be trying, so we want to show you some of the reactions that past cast members have got’. And these were people who were in these movies who did a great job, and these dudes were like ‘kill him!’. I mean, you can’t say that before the movie comes out, you know. It doesn’t matter what people think before then, it matters when you see the movie. I was like, ‘I’m a big boy, I can handle anything, I’m tough’ and they said ‘just don’t use the internet for a couple of days’ and I thought ‘this is not… I handle sh*t’ so I saw the announcement, I looked on this thing, I looked on the first comment, ‘Ben Affleck is going to be Batman’ – the first one goes ‘Noooooo’. Enough! Thank you very much…”
Batman vs. Superman is being written by David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Man of Steel) and will see Affleck joined in the cast by Henry Cavill as Superman, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Diane Lane as Martha Kent and Lawrence Fishburne as Perry White. It is set for release on July 17th 2015.
