Ben Affleck says people are ‘baffled’ to find out he’s actually quite smart

Ben Affleck won the top prize on Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? over the summer.

Ben Affleck has admitted people are surprised to discover he’s smart even after he won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

The 54-year-old actor, who co-owns production company Artists Equity with lifelong friend Matt Damon, won the top prize on the iconic gameshow back in July alongside Jeopardy! champion Jamie Ding.

Ben told GQ magazine’s One More Question: “I recently went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and won a million dollars.

“And I was telling somebody the texts I got are all kind of like… The underlying tone is one of slight bafflement. Like, ‘How the f*** does this guy do that?’ “

Ben’s winnings were donated to Eastern Congo Initiative, the non-profit he co-founded with Whitney Williams in 2010 to support community-led organisations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The actor, whose AI company InterPositive has been bought by Netflix for a reported fee of $587 million, linked the sale to his success on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

He explained: “To me, that episode was really interesting because that actually was, in terms of me riding a much smarter person’s coattails to great success, I think what people assumed was the real story behind the writing of Good Will Hunting.

“But look, at the end of the day, it was a difficult thing to do, to build. It certainly was not all me.

“And I was really gratified that we were able to sell it in particular to Netflix because the thing that I really cared about was not just, again, contributing to the sense of the extraction, but Netflix — they are a film studio, they make movies.”

Ben saw the Netflix deal as “a way of enshrining” his AI firm inside an organisation which works alongside creatives.

He added: “They cannot make a movie with you in it without compensating you. They’re a guild signatory.

“It’s a way of enshrining this technology inside a space that does exist for all of its failings with an understanding that the producers and the artists and the crafts, we’re all in this together and that one can’t survive without the other.”