Could the past repeat itself in the near future?
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez haven't been an item for years, but after the actor announced that he is divorcing Jennifer Garner, fans of the former couple began to wonder if the original Bennifer might get back together. In fact, one fan called in to Bravo's Watch What Happens Live Wednesday to ask Lopez's BFF Leah Remini about that very possibility. "Now I'm interested in this answer!" Andy Cohen said.
"So am I!" Remini said with a laugh.
In all seriousness, she admitted, "I really don't know." Proving her loyalties lie with Lopez, the It's All Relative star said, "Even if I did, I probably wouldn't [say], because it would be weird for me to comment on people's lives. But no, not anything that I know of is...The guy is married and she's in a relationship."
"She's back with [Casper Smart]," Cohen noted.
"No," Remini said of Lopez's apparently on-again relationship with the dancer turned choreographer. "I'm just saying that whatever's in the news is the data that we have. It's the data we're working with."
"She's back with Casper," Cohen said.
"Oh, OK!" Remini said with a laugh, feigning ignorance. "Thanks!"
In reality, it seems unlikely that Affleck would subject himself to such a spectacle. "The most pernicious illusion, myth, was that this is something that this guy wants," he told GQ in 2012 of the attention he received during his relationship with Lopez. "'He's wanting this much coverage.' That's the most unappealing thing that you can say about somebody. And I knew how disastrous it was. It was the last thing I wanted, and I could tell it was damaging me, and I tried to get away from it, but there was still this idea: This is what this guy wants, he's a shallow guy, a camera whore or whatever. And there was no convincing people that that wasn't the case."
Lopez wasn't entirely to blame for how the public perceived him. "There were ways I did contribute to it, still kind of naively. Like these car dealerships would often say, 'Hey, do you want to drive around a car? Go take it as long as you like. You can drive this Rolls-Royce for nothing, for free.' The Boston kid in me thought, 'This is great! What a deal! I can just drive this car around. Let my friends drive it.' But then this image of a young guy in a Rolls-Royce was very off-putting to people. Probably be off-putting to me now if I saw it," Affleck said. "And I didn't quite have the wherewithal to be smart about that at the time."
After Affleck and Lopez called off their engagement in 2004, the actor hid out for a while to figure out his next move. "I think I just ran away," he explained. "You can only handle so much. I moved for a while to this place in Georgia that I have, was able to get away, by and large, from stuff. Come up with a plan for how to do something with my life that doesn't put me in the crosshairs of this sort of thing."