Ben Affleck has opened up about his experiences while filming the 2017 film Justice League. The ill-fated film was a product of two directors — Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon — and there have been allegations of abuse from a few members of the cast like Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot.
Affleck, who played the tole of Bruce Wayne/Batman in the film, told the Los Angeles Times “It just was the worst experience. It was awful. It was everything that I didn’t like about this.” He also shared, “That was a bad experience because of a confluence of things: my own life, my divorce, being away too much, the competing agendas and then Zack (Snyder)’s personal tragedy (Snyder’s daughter Autumn died by suicide in 2017) and the reshooting.”
The experience of working on the film, its utter failure disillusioned Affleck from the character. He was also slated to star and even direct a standalone Batman movie, before moving away from the project.
After directing Man of Steel and Batman v Superman — critical reception was mixed on the former, the second was excoriated by critics — Snyder signed on to Justice League, which brought together the greatest DC superheroes. But tragedy struck, and he had to leave the project. Whedon was brought in to finish the film, and he reshot many scenes and tried to add humour like he had done with the first two Avengers movies. The film was a commercial disaster, earning only a little above 650 million dollars on a reported budget of 350 million dollars including reshoots.
Ray Fisher, who played the role of Victor Stone or Cyborg in the film, later claimed that the behaviour of Joss Whedon on the set of Justice League was “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.” Fisher took to Twitter in 2020 and wrote, “Joss Whedon’s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable. He was enabled, in many ways, by Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Accountability>Entertainment.”
Later that year, Gal Gadot also opened up about her adverse experience with Whedon. She revealed that he threatened her career. “What I had with Joss basically is that he kind of threatened my career and said if I did something he would make my career miserable. I handled it on the spot,” she told Israel’s N12 News.
