When Mindy Kaling took the stage at the Democratic National Convention, she could not resist delivering a special message to Ben Affleck.
Kaling, 45, addressed the delegation of her home state of Massachusetts at the DNC in Chicago on Wednesday, August 21, one day after Affleck’s estranged wife, Jennifer Lopez, filed for divorce after two years of marriage.
“I love you, Massachusetts!” the actress and producer said, drawing wild applause. “Everyone is always hating on us. But they just don’t get it. Go Sox! … Ben Affleck, hang in there! Dunkin Donuts, you’re the best coffee in the world.”
Kaling and Affleck, 52, have a long history — kind of. Earlier in her career, Kaling portrayed the Oscar winner in a hit off-Broadway play called Matt and Ben, which she cowrote with her college pal Brenda Withers. The 2002 production was a fictional retelling of how Affleck and Matt Damon wrote the script for Good Will Hunting. (The collaborators went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1998.)
The shout-out from Kaling comes just one day after Lopez, 55, submitted divorce paperwork herself, instead of through a lawyer, at a court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, August 20. She listed the date of her separation from Affleck as April 26, which was three months before they marked their two-year wedding anniversary.
News of the couple’s divorce comes after months of reports that their marriage was on the rocks. The duo went weeks without being spotted together before Us confirmed in May that Affleck moved out of their shared home in Beverly Hills. In July, neither Lopez nor Affleck publicly acknowledged their second wedding anniversary.
A source exclusively told Us that month that the couple were “living separate lives” as they navigated their ups and downs. “Jennifer suggested they just take time to figure it out,” the insider said, noting that “Jen and Ben are having issues in their marriage. They started having issues a few months ago as Jen had started ramping up work commitments and prepping for her tour.”
According to the source, Lopez was “very focused on work,” adding, “They are on two completely different pages most of the time.”
Before their split, Affleck and Lopez’s romance was front and center in This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. The high-concept take on Lopez’s life, which accompanied her most recent album, explored their rekindled relationship. She later shared that the project never would have made it off the ground without Affleck’s encouragement.
“I was like, ‘I don’t write, I don’t do this,’” Lopez recalled at a press conference in February, which was the last month they made a public appearance together as a twosome. “He was like, ‘You do, you write, you direct, you produce, you choreograph, you do all the things. Start stepping into that, start owning a little bit of who you are.’”
Lopez previously gushed over Affleck’s commitment to the music-fueled film. “We collaborate very well together,” she told Entertainment Tonight in December 2023. “So we were able to kind of sit down and really dig into it, in a way that I don’t think any other writer could’ve done with me.”
While neither Lopez nor Affleck have spoken out about their split, Affleck was seen heading into an office building in L.A. on the day of her divorce filing, where he was spotted sans wedding ring.
