The 42-year-old actress - who has children Violet, eight, Seraphina, five, and Samuel, two, with husband Ben Affleck - had been trying to rid her family of the pesky parasites one evening when her husband insisted they attend a Hollywood party and she admits the first impression she gave the ‘Monuments Men’ star wasn’t great because she gave off a distinctive pungent smell from the chemical treatment she had put on her hair.
She recalled: “We all got lice. It’s making me itchy just to talk about it. This was years ago.
“They have people like the Lice Lady, and they come over and they comb painstakingly through your hair, and then they put something on your hair...It looks like they put Crisco in your hair but you smell a little bit like a mixture of sulfur and rosemary. And you do it everyday for a month!
“Ben had gone early and he‘d showered. He came out and he said, ’Hey, um, there’s a party. I wanna go. Let’s go.‘ And I said, ’I can’t. I need to shower.‘ I mean, I’m in, like, cargo pants. I’m nasty in a thousand [ways]. He’s like, ’Come on! I mean, we have a babysitter. I want you to come with me.’
“So, I get in the car and I go with him because he acted like I was going to be high maintenance. I don’t ever want to be called high maintenance. I am not a high maintenance chick! So I’m like, ‘What’s the big deal? No one’s gonna notice.
“We show up and the first person I see is George Clooney, and I‘d never met George Clooney. I was kind of like, ’Ah, he’s so handsome! Like, oh, my God!' So, I see him and I walk up to him and I’m chatting with him, just trying to act like it’s cool...and I can see that he smells me, you know? But he’s trying to be polite.”
And the ‘Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day’ star jokingly claimed her lice problem was the reason why she and her husband weren’t at George’s wedding to Amal Alamuddin in Venice, Italy, over the weekend.
Speaking to talk show host Jimmy Fallon, she laughed: “So, anyway, people keep asking why we weren’t at George’s wedding and we were both ‘working’ but I think he didn’t want Licey there. He’s like, ‘No, we don’t need the Afflecks. We’re OK!’ ”
