Ben Affleck is showing his softer side for Britney Spears ... revealing he felt "empathy" for the "Toxic" singer back in the day when all eyes were on her in the center of the ring -- as Brit put it -- just like a circus.
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00:00Well, Ben Affleck and Britney Spears do have something in common, nothing to do with marriages,
00:05having several of them. It's not like we've seen Ben Affleck and Britney Spears hanging out or
00:09anything. I don't think we ever have. I don't think we ever have. Definitely not the same
00:12circles. But he has been watching her journey through show business and feels, it sounds like,
00:19a kinship with the things that she has had to deal with growing up in this business. Here's
00:24what he said about Britney when he was on Theo Vaughn's podcast last weekend with Theo Vaughn.
00:29I really had a lot of empathy for Britney Spears because I remember that it seemed like,
00:34it's not somebody that I knew or hung out with, but I just like everybody else, you see all this
00:38that comes through. But having had my own experience with myself, I knew these are people who are
00:44following her around in a time where she may or may not have been having difficulty. I think there's
00:50this sense that if you see someone's picture all the time, they must want you to be seeing it,
00:55which is not the case at all. For me, I'm self-conscious. I don't really want you to be
01:00seeing that. As an actor, it's no good for you because I don't really want people, if they watch
01:05a movie, to be like, that's not him because I saw him yesterday eating lunch and I know he's who he
01:09really is. It gets in the way of you being able to create the illusion. It's really hard work to
01:16create the illusion that this person, like the character in The Accountant 2, for example, is a real
01:21person in a real circumstance. In order to get the audience to care about it, to laugh, to find it
01:26exciting and empathize with the character, they have to suspend disbelief. That's harder if you're
01:31constantly being shown something else. I got to disagree. I'm sorry. This is very meta. This is
01:36very meta because I'm listening to what he's saying, but he's on a podcast saying, I don't want people
01:42to see me outside of my character. As they're seeing him outside the character. No, I get it.
01:47And I know that's not what he was referring to, but it is part of it. No, that's what you just said
01:52is a real point. But the other thing is, it's like there are plenty of actors that, I mean,
01:57Jack Nicholson went to the Lakers game all the time, but he could pull off a role. Ben Affleck dates
02:01famous, famous women. Jennifer Lopez, Ana de Armas. When you date these women, you're going to be
02:07photographed. And so I don't understand how he thinks that he can just like hide from the cameras
02:12and not be photographed. I think that's insulting to Ben to say that we wouldn't want to see him
02:16unless he was with women. I mean, I think people care about Ben Affleck outside of the people
02:22he's dating. Do they though? Or married to. But honestly, Charles, he wasn't daredevil. Do you
02:27really want to think like people of your acting skills like that? Like some of the roles that
02:30he's chose, you don't want to like think that that's like his like role. Why are you taking
02:34shots? Anyway, apologies to Theo Vaughn. I got the title of his podcast wrong. It's this past weekend
02:40with Theo Vaughn. Hello, I'm Lisa from Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. It's nice to see Ben Affleck
02:47stick up for Britney Spears. I can only imagine how much pressure it would be to have people
02:53watching her every move, recording it, analyzing it, and making everything public, especially
02:59with fame comes to someone so young like it did with Britney. It must be really difficult
03:05to handle. And Justin Bieber just raised that issue several times. Yes.