Ben Affleck breaks his silence following back to back deaths of his parents
Ben Affleck has spoken about the deaths of his parents for the first time since they passed just two months apart at the beginning of 2026.
Speaking to his Animals co-star Kerry Washington on her Street You Grew Up On podcast, Affleck opened up about the death of his mother and how it gave him a newfound respect for all she did for him and his brother, Casey Affleck.
While he and his father had a strained relationship, Ben Affleck was very close with his mother, Chris. KMazur/WireImage for Coyne PR
“My parents just died, both of them, in April and in June. It’s sort of a big thing and it’s caused me to start thinking about my own childhood in ways that have been a little bit different,” the Argo star said.
“I’ve certainly learned to even more deeply appreciate my mum and really value and see what she did, the sacrifice and commitment that she made and how complete it was.”
Affleck’s mother, Chris Affleck, died on June 2 following a battle with pancreatic cancer. His brother, Casey, later shared that his father, Timothy Affleck, had died just months earlier, in April.
Affleck’s parents divorced when he was an early teen, his father moving to California while he and his brother stayed with his mother in Massachussetts. Over the years, he’s openly discussed his father’s battle with addiction and their complicated relationship.
Following his mother’s death, Affleck found a series of letters she’d written to her own parents after moving away from home.
“This sounds like a crazy thing to say, but it was really weird for me to read these letters,” he told Washington.
“First of all, this young woman full of life and ambition and dreams and not sure, ‘oh, maybe I’ll be a social worker, maybe I’ll be a teacher’, or going, ‘there’s these protests, I’m going to Mississippi’. It was like really fascinating.”
He recalled what hit home the hardest about the letters was the fact that they had nothing to do with him or his brother, forcing an awkward realisation that she lived a full life before they were ever born.
Chris Affleck was mother to Ben Affleck, and his younger brother, Casey Affleck. Getty
“It’s the solipsism of being a child that’s loved, probably in the right way, where … I knew my mum loved me no matter what. I absolutely knew that, you know, I thought like she’d probably still love me if I was a serial killer,” he laughed.
“So it was so interesting to me because all I knew was a person who just made me and my brother the absolute most important centre of her life.”
