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With the highly-anticipated Gone Girl hitting theaters soon, Ben Affleck has been making the media rounds and opening up about his personal demons in some uncharacteristically candid interviews.

Back in May, Affleck was kicked out of a Vegas casino after being accused of counting cards.

Despite his team’s efforts to suppress it, the story continued to balloon out of control for weeks, eventually resulting in rumors that recovering alcoholic Ben had relapsed just before the incident.

Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez in 2021
(Getty Images)

Now, after months of keeping quiet on the subject, Affleck has decided to use the Gone Girl press tour as an opportunity to come clean. 

Is it part of a calculated effort to convince us he was the perfect choice to play the film’s boozy, brooding murder suspect? Perhaps…but whatever the reason, Ben’s latest interviews have resulted in some truly surprising revelations:

 

Asked if he went “method” to depict his character’s heavy drinking Affleck, replied, “In the book it said he was puffy and hungover, and I dedicated myself to that and I think it’s quite convincing.”

Director David Fincher confirmed that Affleck hit the bottle to get into character, saying, “It was six months of real dedication to being hungover.”

Affleck was even more frank about his alleged card-counting when asked about it by Details magazine:

“That is a true story. I mean that took place…I knew with blackjack there’s a way to improve your odds so I started trying to learn. And once I became decent, the casinos asked me not to play blackjack…It was presented like I did something illegal, you know what I mean?”

Wow. So when tasked with portraying a guy stuck in a downward spiral, Ben goes all in (literally) and ramps his boozing and gambling up to 11. 

We can only hope that when he was cast as Batman, he started prowling the streets at night looking for cartoonish supervillains to punch.