Ben Affleck Felt Like His Friendship With Matt Damon Became a Marketing Tool
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have perhaps one of the longest friendships of any pair of actors in Hollywood. But Affleck felt his decades-long camaraderie with Damon also served them well when it came to selling movies.
How Ben Affleck felt his friendship with Matt Damon helped their movies
Damon and Affleck have been friends ever since their childhood years. During an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Affleck reflected on when he and Damon first met.
“I met him when I was eight, he was 10, so he was a little older, he was a lot bigger than me,” Affleck said. “He was always quite a bit bigger than me because, you know, two years is a big deal when you’re 8 and 10. We lived down the street from each other and we’d see each other at the park and stuff. He was kind of the older, bigger kids.”
The two shared the same dream: to become professional working actors. They scored a few small roles growing up before finally creating their own breakthrough with Good Will Hunting. Thanks to the movie, they won their first Oscar. But soon they became known for their friendship almost as much as their acting work.
Affleck felt this was an intentional strategy on the part of film studios.
“Matt and I were a successful marketing hook for Miramax, and they used it,” he once told Entertainment Weekly (via Irish Examiner). “It felt a little bit like we were whoring our friendship, like a guy out there with an organ grinder and a monkey.”
Matt Damon revealed the most profound advice Ben Affleck ever told him
There was some competition between the two as they started to get deeper into acting. Affleck even recalled a situation where Damon was jealous his friend had gotten a role before he did.
“But then I got this job. I got a job on TV. Like a PBS cheesy educational show for kids, which I thought was kind of lame, but it was enough to make Matt boil with envy. Just like, burn with rage,” Affleck said.
At the same time, the pair continued to inspire and motivate each other throughout the years. There was one piece of advice Affleck gave Damon that the latter remembered well into their older years.
“He said to me really one of the most profound things, God, 30 years ago,’’ Damon once told Boston. “So he was 20 years old, and I was 22, and we were starting to write Good Will Hunting, and he said, ‘Judge me for how good my good ideas are, not how bad my bad ideas are.'”
They were words that Damon kept close to his heart even today.
“What it unlocks is your ability to throw the window as wide open as you can and just throw out every idea that you have without any ego at all,” Damon said. “Sometimes you have to get through a lot of bad ideas to get to the good ideas. It was a really incredible thing for a 20-year-old kid to say, and I’ve carried that with me through everything that I’ve done and everything that we have done together, and I always will.”
Have Ben Affleck and Matt Damon ever had a falling out?
Both Affleck and Damon have asserted that their friendship remained pretty consistent over the years. When they opened up on Interview years ago, they confided that they did have their arguments when living together, but nothing serious enough to ever cause a rift between them.
“Ben and I’ve lived together in probably 10 different apartments with 10 other people who we grew up with at different times, and the arguments are always the same. For example, I’m a slob, and I get yelled at for not cleaning up when the house is a mess,” Damon said.
Affleck felt their bond was so strong that they would both end up doing the same kind of work, even if it wasn’t acting.
“Matt and I had identical interests, so whether we ended up successful or making hot dogs at Dodgers games, we knew we’d end up doing the same sort of thing. The remaining friends part was pretty consistent. We saw each other all the time, we talked on the phone all the time,” Affleck said.
