When Jennifer Garner broke her silence on her split from Ben Affleck last month she did so with a proverbial razor-sharp knife. Her words were piercing:

"I always say, ‘When his sun shines on you, you feel it.’ But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it’s cold. He can cast quite a shadow."

Now Affleck, 43, has responded to her comments in an interview with The New York Times.

At first the actor said he does not publicly discuss his family for the sake of his three children and "because it ends up being in the record somewhere, in the great miasma of junk on the Internet."

"Despite vowing not to," says interviewer Dave Itzkoff, "He did eventually address Ms. Garner’s Vanity Fair profile."

"Jen’s great. She’s a great person," Affleck said. "We’re on great terms. I just saw her this morning, so that’s the reality that I live in.

“She felt like she wanted to discuss it and get it out there and get it over with. So she could say, ‘Look, I already talked about it — I don’t want to do it again.’"

He added: "It’s fine. She’s allowed to talk about it."

In her interview, Garner, 43, hinted that she was well aware of Affleck’s alleged infidelities while they were still married.

"People have pain—they do regrettable things, they feel shame, and shame equals pain," she said. "No one needs to hate him for me. I don’t hate him. Certainly we don’t have to beat the guy up. Don’t worry—my eyes were wide open during the marriage."

However, she stressed that their relationship was over before rumours of his relationship with their children's nanny Christine Ouzounian began to surface.

"We had been separated for months before I ever heard about the nanny," she said. "She had nothing to do with our decision to divorce. She was not a part of the equation. Bad judgment? Yes. It's not great for your kids for [a nanny] to disappear from their lives."

Ultimately, Garner defended Affleck, saying: "He's the love of my life. What am I going to do about that? He's the most brilliant person in any room, the most charismatic, the most generous. He's just a complicated guy."

"I didn't marry the big fat movie star; I married him," she added. "And I would go back and remake that decision. I ran down the beach to him, and I would again. You can't have these three babies and so much of what we had."

The couple announced their divorce in June 2015 after 10 years of marriage. They have three children together: Violet, 10, Seraphina, 7, and Samuel Garner Affleck, 4.