Casey Affleck & Summer Phoenix Split: Inside Their 10-Year Marriage
"He's the most generous guy I have ever met," said Phoenix about Affleck in 2006
After nearly 10 years of marriage and many more as friends, Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix confirmed their separation on Wednesday.
“Casey Affleck and Summer Phoenix have amicably separated. They remain very close friends,” Affleck’s rep told PEOPLE in a statement.
Parents to sons Indiana, 11, and Atticus, 8, Affleck and Phoenix got married in 2006 and spoke affectionately about each another for years.
“He is most generous guy I have ever met,” Summer, 37, told Boston Magazine in 2006.
They met through her brother Joaquin Phoenix in 1995 when he and Affleck, 40, worked on To Die For together. For several years, they were just “flirty friends,” Summer once told The Telegraph, and eventually started dating in 2000.
“She was going out with someone else and I said, ‘Man she’s cute,’ and [Joaquin] said, ‘You should see if she’ll got out with … don’t worry about that dude,'” Affleck told The Daily Beast in 2013. “So he was leaving town one day and said, ‘My sister’s in my apartment and she’s all by herself – would you mind checking in on her?’ So, I checked in on her, and it stuck.”
In 2001, the pair costarred in the play This Is Our Youth alongside Matt Damon, another close friend of Affleck’s. The Gone Baby Gone actor proposed to Phoenix during the Christmas holidays in 2003.
“I’ve never had a diamond before, and now I’ve got a diamond surrounded by other diamonds and diamonds in places where, frankly, you don’t need diamonds at all, and I would have been happy with a piece of twine. So, yes, of course I said, yes,” Phoenix said in an interview with The Guardian in 2004 when she was four months pregnant with Indiana, who was born in Amsterdam while Affleck was filming Ocean’s Twelve.
The couple shared a passion for animal rights, with both following a vegan diet and supporting PETA. Speaking to Boston Magazine in 2006, Phoenix affectionately called Affleck “a bleeding heart.”
However, the two were spotted together less frequently in recent years. They were last seen at a public event together in 2014, and last September Summer attended PETA’s 35th anniversary party in Los Angeles without Affleck, but with other family members.
In February, Affleck also attended the premiere of his latest movie, Triple 9, solo.
Their split comes nearly nine months after Affleck’s brother, Ben Affleck, separated from wife Jennifer Garner after 10 years of marriage.