Ben Affleck says losing both of his parents within the same year has changed the way he looks back at the family and home that shaped him. His father, Timothy Affleck, died in April, followed by his mother, Chris Anne Affleck, in June.
The actor addressed the losses publicly during the September 30 episode of Kerry Washington’s Street You Grew Up On podcast. Affleck called losing both parents “sort of a big thing” and said it had caused him to revisit his childhood in ways that felt different from before.
Much of that shift centers on his mother, who died June 2 at age 83 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2025. After her death, Affleck discovered letters she had written to her own parents as a young woman and began reading about ambitions, interests and experiences that existed decades before he knew her as his mother.
That discovery gave Affleck a fuller view of what she later devoted to raising him and his younger brother, Casey. It also fit a broader change in perspective he has described as an adult. Seeing his parents not simply through the roles they played in his childhood, but as people with their own histories, struggles and capacity for change.
His Mother’s Letters Revealed a Life Before Ben and Casey
The letters came from Chris Anne’s younger years, including periods when she was living in California and deciding what kind of work she wanted to pursue. PEOPLE reported that Affleck found references to possible careers in teaching and social work, protests and time spent traveling to Mississippi.
What surprised him most was not any single detail but the realization that those pages documented an entire identity that had nothing to do with him. Affleck said his mother had lived roughly 30 years before he came along, with ambitions and experiences he had never needed to consider when he was a child.
He had grown up certain that her sons were at the center of her world. Reading the letters after her death forced him to place that devotion beside the independent young woman she had been before motherhood, giving him a new way to measure what she eventually chose to invest in her family.
He Now Appreciates How Much His Mother Put Into Raising Them
Chris Anne spent 35 years working in public education and raised Ben and Casey primarily in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after her marriage ended. Her obituary also documented a life of activism that stretched back decades, including teaching literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer and protesting the Vietnam War.
The Boston Globe reported that she remained engaged in civic causes throughout her life while building a career as a teacher. Affleck remembered that commitment in more everyday terms on the podcast. Although her school day formally ended in the afternoon, she often remained there for hours before coming home and taking care of everything waiting for her family.
As a child, he largely experienced that effort as normal. Looking back after her death, Affleck said he had taken some of it for granted in exactly the way a securely loved child often does, and that he now understands the scale of her commitment more deeply.
His Parents’ Divorce Looks Different to Him as an Adult, Too
Affleck’s memories of his father are more complicated. He recalled Timothy struggling with alcohol, anger and employment during his childhood, with conflict becoming an increasingly familiar part of life at home. When his parents eventually told Ben and Casey that they were divorcing, Affleck said his reaction surprised even him.
He remembered being relieved because the conflict would stop. His parents divorced in 1984, when Affleck was around 11 or 12, and Chris Anne went on to raise the boys in Massachusetts while Timothy eventually moved to California.
Affleck’s understanding of his father changed substantially later in life. In a 2020 interview reported by the Los Angeles Times, he spoke about how painful Timothy’s alcoholism had been during his formative years but also emphasized the importance of his father’s eventual recovery. Timothy became sober when Ben was 19 and maintained that sobriety for decades.
Affleck has said that recovery taught him that people can change the patterns that once defined them. By adulthood, he was no longer looking only at what had gone wrong during his childhood but also at the work his father had done afterward to build a different life.