Ben Affleck may have hinted at trouble in paradise when he appeared in now-estranged wife Jennifer Lopez’s The Greatest Love Story Never Told.
When the Prime Video documentary to accompany Lopez’s ninth studio album, This Is Me … Now, was released in February, fans were quick to comment on Affleck’s signature unenthused look. The actor’s signature facial expression appeared to get even more glazed over as Lopez, 55, was showing off actual love letters Affleck had written her.
“I came to the house one day, and she had told me, ‘Musicians are coming, this great producer Rogét [Chahayed], blah blah blah,’ and then I went down there and my book that I had given her was down there,” Affleck, 52, recalled. “She was like, ‘I’ve been reading, this is the kind of inspiration, I’ve been showing them the book.’ I was like, ‘You’ve been showing all the musicians all those letters?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we call you Pen Affleck, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
Affleck’s seemingly horrified reaction to the entire debacle seemed to make the ups and downs in their relationship less surprising. Fans have been resurfacing Affleck’s quotes from The Greatest Love Story Never Told since news broke that Lopez filed for divorce on Tuesday, August 20, after two years of marriage.
Us confirmed that Lopez’s date of filing came exactly two years after their Georgia wedding celebration in August 2022, one month after they tied the knot in Las Vegas.
Other telling moments from The Greatest Love Story Never Told include Lopez acknowledging that Affleck was not “very comfortable” divulging details about their relationship on such a public level.
“He loves me, he knows I’m an artist and he’s gonna support me in every way he can because he knows he can’t stop me from making the music that I made and writing the words that I wrote,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s comfortable being the muse.”
Affleck doubled down on this saying that he “always felt” private moments in their relationship were “sacred and special.” He added: “This was something of an adjustment for me.”
At another point in the documentary, Affleck looked back at the first time he and Lopez were together — noting that this time would be different. (The exes got engaged in November 2002 but split the following year before walking down the aisle and blamed the breakup on the media.)
“When Jen and I broke up before, the catalyst for that was this massive amount of scrutiny around our private life,” he said. “I had a very firm sense of boundaries initially around the press, while Jen I don’t think objected to it in the way I did. I very much did object to it.”
Initially, Affleck’s major term for getting back together was that he didn’t want “a relationship on social media,” but noted that he would “learn to compromise.”
