Ben Affleck says that the poor response to Gigli was ‘depressing’

Ben Affleck has said that the poor response to ‘Gigli’ was depressing.

The 49-year-old actor starred in the romcom alongside popstar Jennifer Lopez – who was his girlfriend at the time and is again following his 2018 divorce from Jennifer Garner – admitted that the poor response to the film left him “questioning” things.

He said: “I thought my job was to be a cipher. I can see now how people looked at me and thought of this person as some callow frat guy who’s cavalier, or has too much.”

The actor-turned-director went on to explain how he felt the movie – which grossed $7.2 million against a $75.6 million budget – left fans with “negative feelings” towards him.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he explained: “[That movie] engendered a lot of negative feelings in people about me. There’s that aspect of people that I got to see that was sad and hard, it was depressing and really made me question things and feel disappointed and have a lot of self-doubt.”

Ben went on to claim that for being such a “famous bomb” at the box office, in actual fact, “very few people” have even seen it.

He said: “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.”