- In a Boston Globe interview, Ben Affleck addressed how seriously he's considered running for office.
- "She probably would have beat my [expletive], so I'm glad I didn't run," he said of Rep. Ayanna Pressley.
- Affleck said "people wanted me to run" in the district Pressley won after a 2018 primary upset.
America may have seen a Congressman Ben Affleck were it not for Rep. Ayanna Pressley's underdog victory back in 2018, the Oscar winner told the Boston Globe recently.
In a Q&A published last week, Affleck said he gravitated toward politics as his career progressed, but a full blown run for office was never on the cards.
"People wanted me to run against [former US Representative Michael] Capuano in the, you know, the old Tip O'Neill district," Affleck said, referring to the third longest serving Speaker of the House of Representatives in US history.
In 2018, Rep. Ayanna Pressley delivered a shocking upset to Capuano in the Democratic primary and ultimately won the seat, joining colleagues who pulled off similar intra-party challenges in what would become "The Squad."
"She probably would have beat my [expletive], so I'm glad I didn't run," Affleck said, with the Globe omitting his swear word of choice. "Even though she's from Ohio, I have a feeling she would have cleaned my clock."
The grind of Congress and the need to keep fundraising also proved unappealing to the movie star and screenwriter, which he said led to him starting the Eastern Congo Initiative instead.
Affleck added that he campaigned for Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004, "felt strongly about gay marriage; and I felt George Bush and the war in Iraq was wrong."
"But I didn't want to run for Congress," he continued.
"I looked at the life of people in Congress and it was a constant process of glad-handing, begging for money, and being beholden to people," Affleck said. "It's so depressing."