The Truth About Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Friendship

Matt Damon Says His Wife Thought Ben Affleck Was the "Cute One" Before Meeting

"Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are childhood friends...This is their first Academy Award."

So the announcer intoned at the 1998 Oscars as the boisterous pair, still looking like a couple of kids from the neighborhood at 25 and 27, headed to the stage to accept their win for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting—the film they decided to write together in between auditions to give themselves the sort of material that interested them as actors.

"We're just really two young guys who were fortunate enough to be involved with a lot of great people," Affleck gushed excitedly as they dissolved into their thank-yous, with extra-special shout-outs to their mothers (both in the audience), Damon's dad and the city of Boston. "There's no way we're doing this in less than 20 seconds."

Having since figured out the whole taxes thing and opened separate bank accounts, Affleck, now 53, and Damon, 55, are still in business—literally, they started their own production studio, Actors Equity—and are still having the best time working with each other.

"Out there" being Hollywood, where they moved in the early 1990s and, yes, it has gone quite well for both of them since the days when they were sharing a bank account that had, Damon noted on TODAY, "not a lot of money" in it.

"I think part of the key is like, we are able to have this friendship because we didn't start off in a fundamentally competitive zero-sum-game way," Affleck told Entertainment Weekly recently of their enduring bond. "And I think a business where there's a lot of scarcity can really inculcate that attitude, because you get the sense that anybody's achievement is somehow eating into yours, or taking away from your opportunity, and we just didn't approach it that way."

And it all started in Cambridge, Mass., when Affleck was 8 and Damon 10 and their families lived just a few streets away from each other.

"I think we're pretty similar," Affleck told ABC News in 2017. "People treat us differently than they used to and respond differently, 'cause they've seen us in movies and in the public sphere. But, I think about Matt and I growing up together and the time we spent together, and the time we spend together now, it's like... I don't think we've changed that much."

At the time, they were even neighbors again.

"Last night he just emailed me and was like, 'Come over and watch Monday Night Football,'" Affleck shared, "and I was like [miming messaging back], 'I'm in New York, I can't come by.' But, you know, we still have that 'you want to come over to my house' kind of thing, which is a great thing, to have a friendship like that to carry you through the strange process of fame and making movies, and all that."

They bonded over baseball and, eventually, acting—which Affleck started doing professionally as a kid and initially didn't have anyone to talk to about it outside of his family until his buddy took an interest.

"Matt gave acting a framework, an integration into the social hierarchy at school," Affleck, who made his movie debut at 13 in the 1981 drama The Dark End of the Street, told Parade in 2007. "As a teenager, the natural thing is to have friends who have common interests and so you fit together seamlessly. Before Matt, I was by myself. Acting was a solo activity where I'd just goof and do something, act in a little TV show or something, and no one understood it."

"None of the other kids knew what it was I did, how it worked, or anything," he continued. "All of a sudden I had this friend, Matt, and he gets it and wants to do it and thinks it's interesting and wants to talk about it. Soon both of us are doing it." 

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Their first movie together, 1992's School Ties, featured Damon's breakout performance as a villainous 1950s-era prep school snob, after which his turn as a soldier in the adventure epic Geronimo paid their rent for awhile. (Their first movie with speaking parts, that is—Damon and Affleck were both uncredited extras in the 1989 classic Field of Dreams.)

Affleck started paddling his way to fame playing bully O'Bannion in the teen classic Dazed and Confused. And while juggling auditions and gigs, they leaned into their Cambridge background and cranked out Good Will Hunting, which Damon had started working on at Harvard while taking playwriting and theater direction classes.

After Damon had been in L.A. for about a year, he told Interview, "Ben and I started talking one night, and the script began flowing right out. Then we wrote it very fast," sometimes together and sometimes separately, faxing each other new pages when they were apart. They sold it to Castle Rock in 1994.

"And actually, it was a source of embarrassment for us when we sold the script," Damon continued, "because a lot of our friends really are writers and can write a lot better than we can, except maybe dialogue. Writing a script is different, though, because to me it's not really writing. It's acting, is what it is. We still don't call ourselves writers. We just kind of go, 'Well, I guess that worked.'"

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"The idea was to do what was best for the movie, which was to get it made," Affleck said. "But after a year, we had a falling-out with [Castle Rock] and they gave the script back to us with a 30-day turnaround period, which meant if we didn't sell it within 30 days they'd get the movie back and would be able to do what they wanted with it. It was either make it with who they were asking us to make it with or take this risk. We were basically being fired and offered tickets to the premiere of this thing we'd put three years of our lives into."

After that, their producer Chris Moore brought Miramax to the project, they got word that Gus Van Sant wanted to direct, so long as they were in the movie, and then all the pieces started falling into place.

And not just the pieces of their project.

By the time Good Will Hunting came out in December 1997 and was greeted with nine Oscar nominations, Affleck was known for his fearless turns as major d-bags in Mallrats and Dazed and Confused and notched his first leading-man role in Chasing Amy, while Damon had lost 40 pounds to play a heroin addict soldier in the Gulf War drama Courage Under Fire and starred in the Francis Ford Coppola-directed legal thriller The Rainmaker.

"You wake up one morning and the world is entirely the same," Damon told The Guardian, "and you know, actually, all the things that mattered yesterday are the same today, except the world is forever going to be a totally different place for you."

He added, "That's the mind-f--k and it takes a few years to even get your head around what's happening… I remember my brother said, 'How are you doing?' And I was, like, 'I'm the f--king same, but everyone else is different.'"

Affleck had also told Interview during the relative calm before the storm, "I think our parents were concerned because everybody knows that acting is a difficult career. I don't think they were that happy with the prospect of their kids facing a lifetime of rejection and scraping by for a sandwich and hoping we'd get free refills at the age of 45. But Matt and I were very straightforward about wanting to be actors. I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn't they? It's great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, 'I'm just gonna go to Hollywood!' is that it seems unrealistic."

Of course, by now they're more than just a couple of actors, or even just movie stars. Rather, they're cultural touchstones, frequently mentioned together but also each representing a different sort of Hollywood archetype. (And forget free refills, they're the heart and soul of Dunkin' Donuts' advertising strategy.)

Since they burst onto the scene, Damon has had the steadier through line—anchoring an action franchise, racking up three Oscar nominations for acting and winning a Golden Globe for The Martian, all with fewer scandals to his bold-faced name than most people in Hollywood, let alone Affleck. He's been married to Luciana Barroso since 2005 and they're raising four daughters together. (Affleck didn't witness Damon's New York courthouse nuptials, but he was there for the Saint Lucia vow renewal in 2013.)

Affleck's lower points, career and otherwise, are well-documented, but his highs—directing accolades, a Best Picture Oscar win for Argo, playing Batman, fathering three children—have put him squarely on the mountaintop.

"There's nobody who's more misunderstood," Damon said of Affleck, talking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 in the weeks following the news that Affleck and Garner were separating after 10 years of marriage. "Ten years ago, the public image of him could not have been farther apart from who he actually is. It was like he was being cast in a role, that he was a talentless kind of meathead, with his whole relationship with Jennifer Lopez."

"He just got cast as this person that he wasn't," Damon shared. "It was just really painful. It was painful to be his friend, because it wasn't fair, you know? To my mind, nobody really got him at all. And through his work, he climbed from the bottom of the mountain all the way back up to the top and past where either of us had ever been."

And Affleck has never taken Damon's enduring support for granted.

"I can't tell you how valuable it is to have somebody who's been through things with you, ups and downs, who knows what your life experience is like, who can identify with that," he told Entertainment Tonight, referring to Damon, in 2017. "It's an incredibly valuable friendship and it's very precious and so is my friendship with my brother. I don't know what I would do without those guys."

But as longtime dear friends, Affleck and Damon have really seen and heard it all when it comes to their enviable bond and professional partnership, including jokes that Affleck was a millstone around Damon's creative neck when they wrote Good Will Hunting, errant reports of a feud and—before the age of social media so not as widely spread, but there all the same—speculation that they were actually a couple.

"When Ben and I first came on the scene, there were rumors that we were gay because it was two guys who wrote a script together," Damon recalled to The Guardian in 2015. "I know. It's just like any piece of gossip...and it put us in a weird position of having to answer, you know what I mean? Which was then really deeply offensive. I don't want to, like, [imply] it's some sort of disease—then it's like I'm throwing my friends [who are gay] under the bus."

A couple years later, Affleck and Damon did have to confront a painful aspect of their early success—the fact that disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein was the financial force behind not only the Kevin Smith movies that gave their careers a boost but also Good Will Hunting.