Jennifer Lopez Speaks out on Ben Affleck’s Abilities as a Stepdad

Ben Affleck is more than just a good filmmaker. He’s also a good dad and stepdad. While on The Today Show Wednesday morning, Jennifer Lopez praised Affleck’s skills as a father and said her twins, 15-year-old Max and Emme, “love” the actor.

“He’s a wonderful, wonderful father and father figure to them,” Lopez said. “He has his own three beautiful children and then there’s us and he’s fantastic. He really steps up to the challenge of what that is and what that means and they love him. They love him. They appreciate him and so do I.”

Lopez, 53, shares Max and Emme with her ex-husband Marc Anthony, whom she married in 2004 after her first engagement to Affleck ended. Affleck shares Violet, 17, Seraphina, 14, and Samuel, 11, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner. The Daredevil stars were married from 2005 to 2018. Lopez and Affleck remained friends after their 2004 split and reunited romantically in April 2021. They married in July 2022.

Max and Emme’s personalities are also starting to show as they become adults, Lopez said on Today. “They are challenging everything in life, they’re looking at everything. And these kids have so much information, so much more than we had,” she explained. “So they’re thinking and talking about things and about life in a different way than I did when I was 15 or 16 years old.”

One very special person who knew Affleck and Lopez were meant to be together was Lopez’s mother, Guadalupe Rodriguez. “I knew that you would always get back together because I prayed for 20 years,” Rodriguez said on Today, Lopez also called Affleck the “love of her life,” adding that her upcoming album, This Is Me… Now, is about their love story.

“I went on an incredible journey through my life for [the] past 20 years, and I think I’ve grown a lot,” Lopez explained. “The album is really about capturing those moments in time. Falling in love and having that moment, then 20 years later trying to capture what this moment was, which was a very different thing.”

In March, Affleck told The Hollywood Reporter that spending more time with his kids was a reason for creating a new production company, Artists Equity, with Matt Damon. He wanted to have a new role that would force him to spend more time working in a Los Angeles office and less time traveling to other parts of the country to make movies. The first Artists Equity movie, Affleck’s AIR, was released by Amazon in April.

“One of the reasons I did it was, I’m divorced. I share custody. I don’t want to go to Austin and New Orleans and Georgia anymore and not see my kids,” Affleck told THR. “It just doesn’t work. These years are too important. If I miss them, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. And then I thought, ‘OK, well, if I’m in Los Angeles and I’m in an office and I’m doing this work, I can step out for the basketball game or the jazz performance.’ So I protect those things.” The actor later said that parenting today is “a total full-time job.”