Ben Affleck has got the looks, the career, the money and the motor. But life has sped along a little too fast, he says. It is time for his flash car to go. The Bentley Continental GT — the preferred wheels of the British Premiership footballer — was his dream car in his bachelor days but now all that’s behind him.

“It is going to be a wrench,” he says glumly. “It’s my fetish car. But I’m trying to simplify things. It is too showy.”

Affleck has clearly had his fill of the high life. A couple of years on the arm of one-time fiancée Jennifer Lopez — actress, singer, fashion designer, perfume vendor and all-round publicity magnet — has done for him. Even though he had the car and the gal with Hollywood’s best chassis, it just didn’t make him happy.

“It was all down to me and how I felt about it,” he says of his 2002 engagement to J-Lo. “I was no longer in control of my life. I thought I wanted certain things but I didn’t. I got lost. I felt suffocated, miserable and gross. I should never have gone down that route or been sucked into all the publicity.”

Affleck has since manoeuvred a pretty smart three-point turn. He is now married to another Jennifer — Jennifer Garner, the nice brunette actress who, when she’s not kicking butt in her television series Alias, wants nothing more than a quiet life. They have a 14-month-old daughter, Violet — and perhaps his wife was the one who insisted that the 198mph Bentley wasn’t the best mode of transport.

“No, it’s my decision,” insists Affleck. “My first car was a 1979 Toyota Corona station wagon, with holes in the floor. So from my early days I got a little too car-fetished. I never had a nice car and always drove shitty vehicles. So when I had the chance, I wanted a wonderful car. But it’s out of my system now — I think.” Still, Affleck’s nose wrinkles with embarrassment when he reports that his wife has a “hybrid Lexus truck”.

His is a classic Hollywood rags to riches tale. A former child actor, Affleck moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s with acting buddy Matt Damon and they struggled for years. “We lived all over the place, getting into debt, being thrown out of apartments, trying to get roles and wanting to be well known,” he says.

“I remember when I first moved here I met one guy who had been acting for about 20 years. He told me he’d made about $8,000 and was having to work as a carpenter. I thought, ‘I am not going to be able to survive here for that long. And I can’t do anything else to make a living.’

“It was depressing. Casting directors would not be shy in telling me why I would never be a leading man. I was too tall, looked wrong, looked as if I knew how to fight but not much else. So you think to yourself, ‘If I could ever just get some success, my problems would be over’.”

For Affleck and Damon the success was sudden and huge when they co-wrote and co-starred in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. It won them an Oscar for best screenplay and established them as international stars. Affleck went from zero to hero. He was suddenly able to secure any role, whether as a cameo in Shakespeare in Love or as the lead in the big-budget Pearl Harbor.

But the personal doubts were already beginning to niggle and his headline-grabbing relationship with Lopez damaged his credibility, earning the pair the nickname “Bennifer” thanks to a string of joint, and largely disastrous, projects including the notorious flop Gigli.

“Hollywood is the world’s capital of ambition,” he says. “And however successful you are it is never enough. You think, ‘I’ll be happy if I have this promotion. I’ll be happy if I have this relationship. I’ll be happy if I am rich.’

“All this stuff we tell ourselves — none of it is true, none of it makes us happy. I just had to relearn all the rules of Hollywood and life that others already knew.”

He’s now learning another rule. Even though his performance in his latest film, Hollywoodland, earned him terrific reviews it was not quite enough to land him an Oscar nomination this year.

Affleck piled on 20lb to play George Reeves, who became one of the biggest American television actors of the 1950s playing Superman until the frustrations of fame and typecasting began a spiral into depression. He was found dead from a single gunshot wound in 1959, a presumed suicide.

“The media insisted on presenting him one way but he did not feel like he was that person,” says Affleck. “I know how he felt. In the end I was reading stuff about myself as if it was a completely different man. Sometimes people can be too nice for Hollywood — and I like to think it was that way with George.”

Affleck has clearly found salvation of his own in marriage and fatherhood. “I took a back seat and crawled out of the celebrity cage,” he says. “It is a cliché to say that having a family changes your life but it’s true. I have rearranged my working life to deal with the new life I have at home. And I am very happy with it.”

He also took time away from movies, which means that Hollywoodland was his first major release for two years. Instead he’s written and directed a small-budget film, out next year, called Gone, Baby, Gone, starring his younger brother Casey and a cast of mostly unknowns.

“I am trying to simplify my life,” he says. “I have Hollywood fame out of my system. We’re looking to relocate and move out of Hollywood altogether. So, you can see, there’s hope for me.”

On his CD changer

I’m playing a lot of music by a guy calledRay Lamontagne the moment — I don’t know if people in the UK would have heard of him

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