Matt Damon Stopped His ‘Good Will Hunting’ Audition With Ex Minnie Driver After Telling Her ‘I Don’t Love You’
Matt Damon and Minnie Driver first collaborated on the Oscar-winning feature Good Will Hunting. Driver won her role thanks to a powerful audition. But Damon couldn’t finish screening with the co-star after saying these words to his ex-girlfriend.
Matt Damon couldn’t continue with the audition after saying his heartbreaking ‘Good Will Hunting’ line
Driver portrayed Damon’s love interest in his highly acclaimed 1997 feature Good Will Hunting. Originally, however, there were some who fought against Driver’s casting in the movie. The explanation was that Driver didn’t have the appropriate looks for the film.
“The producer of Good Will Hunting did not think I was hot enough to be in that film, and did not want me in the film. It came from the top,” Driver once told Daily Mail.
But both Damon and Affleck lobbied for the actor, which helped Driver secure her Good Will Hunting character.
“They fought very hard for me to play that role. I am grateful to them until this day,” she said.
One of the reasons Driver nabbed Hunting was due to a powerful audition that Damon had a visceral response to.
“Matt wasn’t prepared for such a powerhouse acting against him,” Driver’s producer, Lawrence Bender, once said in an interview with John Brodie. “It was a scene where Will tells Skylar, ‘I don’t love you.’ Matt literally had to stop the audition, apologize, and start over. There were five guys in the room and nobody wanted to look at one another because we had tears in our eyes.”
Damon also remembered having trouble getting his bearings while acting opposite the star.
“After four and half years of trying to get this movie made, I didn’t know where I was, who I was, or what was going on. And she’s standing there with this Cheshire cat smile thinking ‘Would you like to join me in the scene or are you gonna stand there with your tongue hanging out?’ I was like ‘Uh-uh, can we start again’ all dorky and stuff,” Damon recalled to Ain’t It Cool News.
Minnie Driver didn’t want others thinking her ‘Good Will Hunting’ performance was based on her relationship with Matt Damon
It didn’t take long for rumors to spread regarding Driver’s relationship with Damon. She confided that she was almost immediately smitten by her co-star after they worked together.
“In real life, by the time we filmed this scene, I was completely in love with Matt. I was blown away by his commitment to me as an actor, he was cute and intelligent and altogether a really charming package. I was young and I fell for him – it’s an occupational hazard,” she said in a 2012 interview with The Telegraph.
But she didn’t want her relationship with The Bourne Identity star to get out at the time. She was concerned how it would reflect on her performances.
“You know I can’t stand the thought that it may detract from my work. You know the thought of people thinking ‘Oh, that’s really good because they’re in love with each other.’ I’ve been trying to play it down an enormous amount, but there comes a point where you really can’t,” she said.
Minnie Driver still felt defined by her relationship with Matt Damon decades after ‘Good Will Hunting’
Driver and Damon’s relationship didn’t last long, with the two breaking up in 1998. But Driver believed that she was still thought of as primarily Damon’s ex-girlfriend, which did a disservice to her identity.
“We do tend to establish women within the context of who they have been in relationships with. I find that a bit annoying and reductive,” Driver told Good Morning Britain(via Yahoo).“But for me, the answer has always just been to do more. You write books, you make more music, you make more films and television, you answer all of that noise with your brightness and your interest.”
