Ben Affleck reflects on meeting Jennifer Lopez on 'Gigli': 'Really meaningful to me in my life'

Affleck and Lopez, 52, were engaged in November 2002 and split by early 2004. Affleck went on to marry Jennifer Garner, with whom he shares three children, and remained with her until they separated in 2015 and filed for divorce in 2017. Lopez married Marc Anthony, with whom she shares twins, and they were officially divorced by 2014.

Lopez had one more relationship with Alex Rodriguez—engaged in March 2019, publicly split last April—before reuniting with Affleck. Bennifer was officially back on with this post from Lopez's 52nd birthday, confirming months of proof and rumors leading up to it:

As for Gigli, this is the rest of what Affleck, a two-time Oscar winner, told Damon about it:

"You know, it's an interesting thing because it was a really easy choice. I loved Midnight Run. I loved Beverly Hills Cop. I loved Scent of a Woman. Marty's obviously enormously gifted. There's no question in my mind that this was a guy I wanted to work with. There was wonderful stuff in there. There are things where my daughter will be like, 'This is ableist and disgusting,' and okay. The way we see stuff has changed a little bit, or a lot in some cases. And there are things that seemed they could work at the time and don't in retrospect.

"But really, the truth about that movie and what it taught me was how much everything around a movie sort of dictates the way people see it. But for being a movie that's such a famous bomb and a disaster, very few people actually saw the movie. It doesn't work, by the way. It's a sort of horse's head in a cow's body. And the studio at the time, because I had begun having this relationship with Jennifer Lopez, which was selling a lot of magazines and appeared to generate a lot of enthusiasm, they just predictably latched onto, 'They want a romantic comedy. They want the two of them together. More of that!' And it was just like that SNL sketch: 'Bad Idea.'

"But even movies like The Sum of All Fears that worked commercially but didn't have any depth to them, I didn't do anything particularly interesting in them. [Gigli] didn't work and we did five weeks of reshoots, which we knew were not gonna work. It was a movie that didn't work.... Interestingly, I learned more about directing on that movie than anything else because Marty is a brilliant director, really gifted. It's not like it's worse than all... there's a bunch of horrible movies and in terms of losing money, I've had five movies — at least! — that have lost more money than Gigli has. 

"It's just that it became a story in and of itself. The funny name, the Jennifer Lopez romance and overexposure of that, it was kind of a perfect storm. And I remember talking to Marty the Friday it came out and I was like it's just spectacular, it's a tsunami, it couldn't be worse. This is as bad as it gets."

See more from Affleck's EW cover story below.