Ben Affleck's Misery at the 2023 Grammys Became Twitter's Favorite New Meme
With its steady stream of music numbers and high-profile musicians all in one room, the Grammys is the most concert-like of the award season shows. But not even all that music could seemingly charm Ben Affleck, who attended the ceremony as his wife and presenter Jennifer Lopez’s date. Whenever the camera panned over to him, Affleck, already famous for the Sad Affleck meme, looked pretty miserable.
Twitter noticed, and a new meme took off, with introverts in particular relating to Affleck looking very unpleased to be out. “You think the Grammys are too long? Imagine how Ben Affleck feels,” one user wrote. Another observed, “Ben Affleck is every introvert everywhere. You can see his batteries draining in real time. Man is already at 23% #GRAMMYs #SaveBen.”
And a third user joked, “Ben Affleck is so consistent in his misery I almost have to admire it.”
Truly, Twitter had a lot of thoughts. Here, some of the funniest reactions to Affleck’s Grammys display:
Affleck actually spoke last January about how he feels about the internet’s original Sad Affleck meme during an interview with The Los Angeles Times. He personally has a good sense of humor about it but worries about how his children see him. He and ex-wife Jennifer Garner have three kids: 17-year-old Violet, 14-year-old Seraphina, and 10-year-old Samuel.
He admitted he initially struggled with what people wrote about him in the early 2000s, but a therapist helped. “I had a therapist once who gave me really good advice,” he said. “This was 2003 or 2004 and I was really struggling. People were just writing vicious, awful, hateful stuff about me all the time and it really started to affect me. The therapist said, ‘What I find about criticism is that if you can look at it honestly and take in what resonates with you, then the rest of it you can let go.’ And that was a process that got me into directing and gave me the confidence to start doing that.”
“I got to a place where [the public perception] was so different from who I am that I just stopped reading and stopped caring,” Affleck continued. “But then, as my kids got older and started seeing the internet themselves, that’s the difficult part. Even the ‘Sad Affleck’ meme—that was funny to me. I mean, there’s nobody who hasn’t felt that way at a junket. But then my kids see it and I think, ‘Oh, are they going to think their dad is fundamentally sad or they have to worry about me?’ That’s really tough.”
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.
