Ben Affleck’s back tattoo was “awful,” singer Jennifer Lopez had said in an old interview that has resurfaced online, days after she officially rekindled her relationship with the Hollywood actor.
In a 2016 appearance at Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, the 52-year-old singer laughingly shared her honest opinion of Affleck’s massive back tattoo drawn in the shape of a phoenix.
“It’s awful!” she said cheerfully. “I mean, I would tell him that. I would tell him like, ‘What are you doing?’”
“It has too many colours. His tattoos always have too many colours,” the “Cambia el Paso” singer pointed out. “They (tattoos) shouldn’t be so colourful, you know what I mean? They should be, like, cooler, I don’t know.”
Affleck surprised everyone when he was first spotted with the multi-coloured tattoo that covered his entire back on the set of his film Live by Night.
The actor and filmmaker had gone through a highly publicised split from actor Jennifer Garner, his wife of 10 years, a few months earlier.
The Justice League actor initially told Extra that the tattoo was a “fake for a movie.”
In a 2019 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, however, Affleck said the ink was actually permanent.
“It’s meaningful to me,” he told Ellen DeGeneres. “I like it.”
The phoenix tattoo “represents something really important to me,” he said.
“It’s something I sort of kept private. It wasn’t like I was sort of doing photoshoots or whatever. We were two hours north of the city on some island in Hawaii and we didn’t know paparazzi was there,” he said, referring to a 2016 trip to Hawaii. “So they got a picture of my tattoo and yeah, the sentiment ran, you know, against [it].”
Lopez wasn’t the only with less-than-stellar reviews for Affleck’s body art.
“You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart’,” ex-wife Garner said of Affleck’s tattoo at the time. “A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario? I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”