Slashy Words Relating to Matt and Ben

Also see the slashy bits from Matt Damon by Kathleen Tracy.

Things Matt has said about Ben and their relationship:

[Ben and I haven't been roommates] since we got rid of our New York apartment. He was there for two weeks last year and I was there five days and we paid rent for the whole year. It was crazy.

[Ben and I] weren't too rebellious. But every time we sat down to dinner, Chris [Ben's mom] would say, 'why don't you guys become doctors?'

But you know, long ago Ben and I convinced ourselves that [narcissism] didn't mean us, too.

If one kid had enough for a candy bar, then the candy bar was bought and split in half--that's just the way it's been.

There are few colleges that Ben hasn't gone to.

Ben's too modest to tell you this, but he's the most well-read person I know. He's certainly a lot smarter than I am.

I started writing (Good Will Hunting) at twenty-two, and I'm twenty-seven now. I never understood how movies could take that long to get made, and would hear stories of "development hell" and think, 'That's not me.' I was in a playwriting class at Harvard and came up with this character I wanted to play. What happened to Ben and I, when we actually got to write it six months later, we basically couldn't get arrested. My acting agent read the script and he gave it to the literary department. They started this bidding war. Here Ben is sleeping on my couch in a tiny little place in West Hollywood, and Ben's six-four and doesn't fit on the couch. It's a pathetic sight.

When I was eight or nine I was getting into children's theater groups. My parents are divorced, but they agreed if I was interested in it, it was fine. They weren't stage parents or anything. I got my agent at sixteen. I told my mom and dad I was ready to go professional. As if I was a baseball player! Ben had an agent because he'd done a PBS series as a kid which was on Channel 2 in Boston. Ben's two years younger but he's the guy--he knows everything. We've known each other for my whole life and we grew up two blocks apart from each other in Cambridge. Ben at fourteen says, 'I can get you an audition with my agent.' We had a T.J. Maxx commercial, and that paid me $200. That was the money I used to go to New York and get back. The agent signed me and until I was nineteen I felt like I'm doing everything I can professionally, so I did college.

My freshman year at Harvard...this is a horrible, embarrassing story. This was probably the third "meeting" I'd had in two years. I tell everybody I'm going to New York to meet the president of Walt Disney--and I go to New York and it turns out I'm not meeting the president, it's an audition for The Mickey Mouse Club. Ben and I went together, and we still talk about it. I didn't make it.

It's so much better that [stardom] happened to [Ben and I] at the same time. It makes it more special. To look over and see it happening to your best friend is pretty cool.

Ben used to ring my doorbell and then cower on the other side of the street, because he was afraid of the little kids at this school right next door.

[Ben and I] are pretty inseperable, in terms of our experiences. We look at things in exactly the same way.

It wasn't like someone was good at structure and someone at dialogue. The only difference between us is Ben can type.

From a very early age, [Ben and I] wanted to [make our own movie]. One of the reasons we're so tight is we always had a lot in common, a lot of similar interests and sensibilities. Writing the script was very easy with him. Ben and I just had this reservoir of common knowledge we could draw on.

I don't care if we're nominated for best morons, because I'd think, well, I got nominated with Ben, and that's pretty cool.

Well, we grew up together, and I think we just look at the world in the same way. He's the funniest guy I know and the best actor I've ever met. Um, I just admire him greatly. You gotta admire a close friend of yours.

The suits were going, 'Boys, we were thinking half a mil'. And Ben and I, who weren't sure if we can afford McDonald's tonight, are sitting there like 'Half a mil? Hmmm'.

I don't know if Ben's my best friend. He was just sorta there.

Well, Ben cheated on me in 87, but no, we don't really fight.

We're constantly accused by people who come in and out of our circle of friends that we're the most boring people ever. There are people who go, 'I got tickets to see so-and-so, and why don't you guys come?' We're like, 'Yeah, whatever,' and end up at the same bar every night with the same people telling the same old jokes. We've always been that way.

Matt to Ben:

Well, you do throw those screeching hissy fits.

Things Ben has said about Matt and their relationship:

I've been linked to Pamela Anderson, Calista Flockhart--and Matt Damon.

Bits from an interview:

eDrive: So, you guys went to the same high school together in Cambridge, right?
Matt Damon: Yeah. I'm two years older than Ben.
Ben Affleck: Right. It had -- and I'm sure it still has -- a really strong drama program. Matt was an ambitious student in a mediocre program. I was an unambitious student in a difficult program. Sorry, "pilot" program.
Matt: That's sour grapes, man. Just because you didn't get into Harvard... Ben likes to describe his college career as "choppy." How many actual colleges didn't you go to?
Ben: Matt was the kind of guy who brought in a lot of apples to his teachers, if you see what I'm getting at. I was a little more contentious, challenging my teachers. And, yes, I went to quite a few colleges, but, I don't believe Matt ever did graduate from Harvard...
Matt: No, I didn't. I was The Class of 1992 - ?

Ben: Right. First of all, I think I should say that we pale by comparison to The Beatles. But my understanding is of how they worked was that they would go off and work separately. Matt and I worked together in the same room most of the time, riffing off of one another's ideas for scenes or certain lines of dialogue. We'd ask each other, 'What do you think should happen here?" You wouldn't believe all the permutations, especially where it was going, getting the CIA involved when they discovered Will's abilities. But we didn't want to go there, where a lot of other movies had gone.
Matt: It was basically throwing stuff up at the wall and seeing what would stick. We'd just beat it into something. A lot of it was just based on observances, like, "Remember that time I wasn't with you, and I went around the corner and saw..." And Ben would say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah -- that's great! Quick, right it down." We tried to write moment to moment, to be truthful in that moment. We're not big on writing structure. We're not writers with formal training or anything.

eDrive: You guys are pretty busy, but I suggest, if you haven't already, jotting down some notes for an Oscar acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay honors.
Ben: Man, I haven't even thought about that. You can't think about that stuff.
Matt: Really, no way. Ben can write it.
Ben: Matt, I think, should write it.

The relevant bits from the Ben Affleck article in the February 21, 2000 issue of People (you'll notice I left out all mention of Gwyneth):

Still the party list for the New Year's Eve bash he cohosted with Damon at Boston's Sonzie restaurant had fewer showbiz honchos than grade-school teachers. "It was very family-like," says Costas Panagopolous, a hometown friend of Damon's who sipped Dom Perignon and nibbled from a buffet of turkey and pasta and steamed vegetables with some 250 other guests. "At midnight, Ben was on one side of the room, hugging his family, and Matt on the other, with his family. Then the two of them moved to each other in the center of the room and gave each other a long hug, as if to say, 'We've come a long way together--thank you for being there with me,'" says Panagopolous. "It was a really special moment."

"I keep trying to trap Ben in some kind of competitiveness" with pal Matt Damon, says Bounce writer-director Don Roos. "But they're not rivals in any way."

With the local kids--including Damon, whose bedroom Affleck could see from his own second-story room--he played Little League and practiced the art of break dancing.

Along with Damon, he starred in plays at Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school. They plotted their careers, putting away money in a joint bank account for future audition trips to Manhattan and, as Damon later told Interview magazine, held "business lunches" in the high school cafeteria.

Still, he was unsatisfied, and he and Damon--who had recently moved out West--began cowriting a screenplay.

And for now, it seems, content with bachelorhood--complete with five motorcycles and what Moore calls "an amazingly messy" house.

From 25 Things You've Never Heard About Matt Damon:

9. As teens, Matt and Ben Affleck worked at a movie theater together. Matt quit after Ben got fired for constantly being late. What a bud!

18. As struggling actors, Matt and Ben decided to rework GWH in hopes of getting a movie deal. They sat in their apartment eating Cheerios, scribbling script revisions. They eventually sold it (duh!).

24. When his baby nephew cries, Matt sings him the cheesy '70s song, "Afternoon Delight".

From 25 Things You've Never Heard About Ben Affleck:

7. Ben may have a hot bod now, but as a teen, he was tall and skinny. He was seriously sensitive about how un-athletic he was.

8. He's still shy about baring his bod (darn!)--during a recent GQ photo shoot, he refused to take off his shirt. After some coaxing, he finally undid a few buttons.

14. Kevin signed Ben up for his next flick, Dogma (he plays a bad angel who gets thrown out of heaven). Ben talked Kevin into hiring his then un-famous pal, Matt Damon. It'll be out in 1999.

16. When Ben and Matt first wrote Good Will Hunting, it was a conspiracy thriller involving NASA, the FBI, and cracking secret codes.

17. What else got revised? Ben's character was gonna get killed.

18. While writing the Good Will Hunting script, Ben had to do all the typing. Harvard-educated Matt doesn't know how to type!

19. At a pre-Oscar party, Ben dressed as a girl (he borrowed Madonna's coat) and Matt played his lover in a spoof of the English film The Wings of the Dove.

20. On Oscar night, he slept with his award like it was a teddy bear.

24. Ben's writing three more screenplays with Matt. Next up is Halfway House (about Boston drug abuse counselors). This time, Ben plays the lead!

25. You thought Matt was Ben's best friend? Nope--his mother wins out. This sweet son recently bought Mom a new car.

Bits from Matt's interview with The Advocate (reformatted slightly for ease of presentation):

Don't expect Damon, however, to star anytime soon in a revival of Babes in Arms, and certainly not with lifelong good buddy Ben Affleck. The two remain call-each-other-at-all-hours close and make periodic noises about finishing that next screenplay, but any discussion about their friendship strikes Affleck, according to Damon, as "weak." Their bond, of course, still causes some people to regard them as more than pals. In this interview Damon addresses the subject head-on, while admitting that "the speculation isn't quite as much fun as it used to be."

Q: Ripley, however is a very sad soul, and you appear to be anything but. What personal experiences did you draw on to convey that part of him?
A: Like everybody, I'm lonely to some extent. Like everybody, I live in fear of not being loved and not having love returned. And I think everybody has a Dickie Greenleaf in his life: someone who is extraordinarily charismatic but who can go away.

Q: But when, at the movie's end, Peter Smith-Kingsley, a sweet, sensitive musician whom Ripley meets...
A: The ultimate man!

Q: The movie reminds us that there is a vulnerability involved in same-sex friendships that is just as acute as those in full-fledged gay love affairs.
A: Same-sex relationships with anyone when you are young entail extreme vulnerability. The first experience most of us have of devastating personal rejection is not with someone we want to date but with someone we want to befriend.

A: My theater teacher was not gay, but I probably had more gay than straight teachers in high school. So being gay, luckily, was not something that I was "introduced" to at some age. It was more that I was introduced to the prejudice against it. I had the reverse of a typical growing-up in that regard.

Q: Your lifelong friendship with Ben Affleck had been endlessly scrutinized since your success with Good Will Hunting. Given how you grew up, was it odd to be tagged as lovers and have that speculation be viewed by some people as a negative thing?
A: The gay assumption seemed silly to me, a real waste of attention. But I understand that the idea of something hidden fascinates people.
Q: At first, your friendship with Ben was a good marketing ploy. But now that your careers are established, has that strategy gotten tired?
A: Absolutely. You reach a point where it's your friendship and no one else's.

Q: To go back to you and Ben, would it be so terrible if you were a couple?
A: The question of whether Ben and I are gay is so awkward in a lot of ways. There is no real right way to answer it without offending somebody. It's offensive to just deny it fiercely, as if there would be anything wrong with it if we were a couple. That would be offensive to the people I grew up with. I don't want to be that person. At the same time, I can't say it's true because it's not. Ben once made light of this type of tabloid speculation by telling an interviewer something like, "I'm sure there are gay people who are in the closet in Hollywood, but also I'm sure that they didn't sleep with Henry's friend. [Laughs]

Q: One of the strangest things about the media's attempt to disparage your relationship with Ben is that male friendship used to be considered a noble thing. It was not powerful men but powerful women who were divided through the use of the gay rumor. Now same-sex closeness of both genders is targeted.
A: I guess it's not enough for me to say that I love Ben so much that I'd take a bullet for him.
Q: You also have to say--pardon my bluntness--that you'd take his dick up your ass.
A: Yeah. It's completely bizarre.

Q: The clothing interchange reminded me of one of the real pleasures of being a gay couple: wearing your partner's wardrobe.
A: But that's not necessarily a gay thing. My group of closest friends and I lived, until recently, in these loose communal situations--in New York, L.A., Boston. And there was a constant raid on somebody's closet. You'd see one of your roommates in a restaurant, and he'd say, "Hey, that's my shirt. You asshole! I just washed that shirt."

Q: Some actors consider it a little unmanly to have to obsess so much about their appearance. Do you?
A: I worry about appearance less than I used to. I look at Brad Pitt. I will never, and could never, look like that. He is just incredible to look at. Period. If I were gay, he would be one of the posters on my wall. Ben and I both have more realistic ideas about what we look like. Not that we're insecure about it. But I know what drop-dead gorgeous looks like, and I know that I'm not it. I also know that I don't want to think, ever, about how I look when I'm in front of the camera. Because then I'm thinking about the wrong thing.

From Wisconsin Light (courtesy of Amatia):

"I am so interested in 'The Dreyfus Affair'," chimes Affleck. "Even thought it may not happen. The screenplay, based on Peter Lefcourt's book shies away from nothing, man," he says. For those who do not know anything about the acclaimed novel, here's the skinny. It is based on a Cal Ripken type baseball player who falls in love with a second baseman. The book and the screenplay include a lot of graphic gay sex scenes. "I'm not scared of those scenes at all," says Affleck. "Matt Damon has done his gay movie 'The Talented Mr. Ripley', so now it's my turn," he says jokingly. Who knows? Maybe Matt will get lucky enough to play the second baseman.

From the Interview Magazine interview:

Ingrid Sischy: I want to start at the beginning of your friendship. Did you both grow up in the same neighborhood?
Ben Affleck: Yes. Two blocks away from each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Matt Damon: Cambridge is not that big of a town. It's like the People's Republic of Cambridge.
BA: And what people of similar political persuasions tend to flock together. Most lefties in "Cambridge County" know each other.
MD: And we were basically best friends since I was ten and he was eight.

IS: How did you meet?
MD: My mother is a professor of early childhood development, and she knew of Ben's mother -- who's a teacher of little kids -- and sought her out after we moved back to Cambridge. So I was pretty much forced into hanging out with Ben.
BA: And Matt was a break-dancer at the time.

IS: Can you remember Matt, what Ben was like in those days?
MD: Absolutely. I remember exactly what he was like: gregarious, outgoing. It was no surprise that he grew up into the totally obnoxious guy he is now. Number one, he claims that I never struck him out in Little League. Which is total bullshit -- I was the best pitcher in the league.
BA: That achievement in Little League grows exponentially with each passing year.

IS: I see.
BA: We are the warrior and the clown.

IS: Did you do theater in high school?
MD: A lot. I knew since I was twelve that I was going to be an actor. I was originally going to be a basketball player. Tiny Archibald was my favorite player -- he's called Tiny because he's only six foot one. My father sat me down and said, "I'm the tallest Damon ever to evolve and I'm five eleven. But I'm never going to play in the NBA." I gave up basketball at that moment and took up acting.
Whatever I did, I wanted to be the best at it. I remember the moment in The Natural when Robert Redford says, "I just want to walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'" So I was talking to my mother one day -- this was when I was sixteen or seventeen -- and she goes, "Matt, why are you so obsessed with acting?" And I said, "Because someday I want to walk down the street and have people say, 'There goes Matt Damon, the best there ever was.'" And she said, "Did I raise you? That's just an egomaniacal pipe dream. How does it help other people?" Of course I hadn't given much thought to that.
BA: In fact, in high school I can remember trying to convince Matt's mother that not everybody in Hollywood was a total liar and scum. I was saying that there are people in Hollywood who have a social conscience, too. I only repeat this years later now that I realize it was a total lie. (laughs)

IS: When you've had relationships, have you always respected each other's choices?
BA: There's respect, but I think you have a false relationship if you pretend all the time that everything's fine. I think you can only have a healthy friendship with somebody if you're willing to say, "Listen, man, you're not fucking picking up after yourself," or, "The person you're dating is obnoxious." I think that happens and you kinda accept it.
MD: Ben and I lived together in probably ten different apartments with ten other people who we grew up with at different times, and the arguments are always the same. For example, I am a slob and I get yelled at for not cleaning up when the house is a mess. When Ben brings the hookers over, it's ---

IS: Are you roommates now?
MD: We are up until a few months ago. We had a place in New York, but we didn't live there because we were both off doing movies. Now Ben's living with his girlfriend in L.A. and I jut finished working on a film, so I'm going to stay with a friend of mine, Cole Hauser, who's one of the actors in Good Will Hunting.

IS: Was Ben always the one with all the girls calling?
BA: That was Matt, really. I was a total failure with girls; it was a catastrophe. It was the girls from the United Way that called me. (laughs) The real story is that I have a problem with the telephone and I don't return phone calls if I can't deal with something. It's not because I'm cool -- it's because I'm a loser and I'm afraid of dealing with something that's awkward and uncomfortable.
MD: Which made one of our roommates mad. He would say, "Would you just call her back? That's all you have to do." And Ben would say, "Yeah, I know. I will, I will." And then the phone would ring again and he wouldn't take the call.
BA: Matt's just better at being diplomatic about these things.

IS: What's Good Will Hunting about?
MD: First of all, let me preface this by saying we are the worst people in the world at doing pitches. We could make really good movies sound terrible, and this one's not very high concept to begin with.
BA: The thrust of the movie is that it's about a kid from a working-class neighborhood in South Boston.
MD: He's an orphan, a born genius, who's discovered working as a janitor at MIT, and it's about him being caught between all these different worlds: the world of his friends; the world of the therapist [played by Robin Williams] he comes in contact with; the world of this really amazing woman [Minnie Driver] he meets who challenges him; and then there's the lure of the world his genius introduces him to, which is represented by this math professor [Stellan Skarsgard]. So he has to face all these different forces that are at work. It's like a comedy and a drama and a coming-of-age story.

IS: Would you say the film is about your friendship or that it's in any way autobiographical?
MD: It has those elements, but it's totally fictional story.
BA: Telling this story came naturally to us. It wasn't like we sat down and had a formula. It was much more like: Well, what would be fun to act?
MD: We never fancied ourselves writers. And actually, it was more a source of embarrassment for us when we sold the script, 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."

IS: When you began the script, it was partly because you weren't getting the roles you wanted at the time?
BA: Right. If no one else was going to give us the chance to do the kind of acting we thought we could do, we decided we'd just make that movie ourselves -- however we could do it, low-budget, whatever. The whole idea was to have a videotape on the shelf at the end of the day and be able to say, "We made this."
MD: We wrote it right out of frustration. It was like, Why are we sitting here? Let's make our own movie. And if people come to see it, they come; and if they don't, they don't. Either way it beats sitting here going crazy. When you have so much energy and so much passion and no outlet for it and nobody cares, it's just the worst feeling. And there are hundreds of thousands of people like that in L.A. right now. This whole "I'm too cool to care" thing you get among young actors in this country is so weak and stupid and played out, and it just brings everybody down. You shouldn't be too cool to care, for Christ's sake. You should be full of vim and vigor, and trying to do everything you can to make a change.

IS: What happened next with the Good Will Hunting script?
BA: We are living proof that fortune favors the fool more than once. We showed it to our agents and various people ---
MD: And it literally turned into a four-day event. It started on a Monday, and by Thursday night there was an all-out bidding war for the script.

From Film Scouts' Matt Damon interview:

On being best friends with, but also in constant competition with fellow actor-writer Ben Affleck. Well, we've had rises and falls that weren't necessarily meteoric but the word was "Us". If one of us was working and we had enough for both of us to go through life, great. The money was basically there to be shared. Ben would be in a series, like eight episodes, he made a little money, great. I did something, I made a little money, great. We're always looking out for each other. We go out for the same parts all the time but it's never really come down to a director saying, "It's either you or Ben." It would be more like, " It's Brad Pitt or you." But you always root for your own guy. I hung out with a bunch of actors and I always felt that if I don't get it, I hope someone in the group does, because I thought they were the best guys around and they deserved it.

On co-writing, part one. There are a bunch of different ways to do it. We really didn't have a formula. There were a lot of times when Ben and I just improv'd. We'd take a tape-recorder, put it down and just start improvising. Eventually we might come up with for a half-hour improv out of which we might have fifteen seconds that were good. And we'd be looking through the tape and "Yeah yeah yeah! That's it! That one! Write that down." And maybe a scene would start from that line.

It also depended upon our work schedules. At one point, I ran out of money and I took a job that ended up being a wonderful job, a TNT movie called The Good Old Boys that Tommy Lee Jones directed. The bad part was I was stuck in Alpine, Texas. There was one fax machine in the entire town run by this Iranian guy named Rajou. I used to go and he would send my fax away for me. He drove a Lexus and it was the only Lexus in West Texas. And his license plate read "Rajou". Anyway, Rajou was our middle man for our script for a few months there.

So Ben would fax me scenes, I'd look at them and I'd make notes. It would give me ideas, I'd send that back to Ben, Ben would read it... You know what I mean? And then we'd call each other on the phone and say, "Okay, that worked, this didn't work. -- All right, now I see from this scene we needed this other scene... -- Okay, I'll work on that. I'll take a shot on the set tomorrow, they're shooting a scene I'm not in, I'll have a couple of hours to do just that and I'll fax it to you at the end of the day." That's basically how it went.

On co-writing as opposed to going it alone. Well, two things: In the first place, writing came out of frustration, 'cause I didn't get a job. Two: co-writing was the only option. I had written forty pages for a class and I didn't know what to do with them. Didn't know where to go, didn't have the discipline to sit in front of the computer and wait for something to happen.

I showed it to Ben who, I think, is one of the brightest guys that I know, we have similar sensibilities -- and he had the same reaction: He liked it but didn't know where to go with it. We sat on it for a year. And then it started coming. And it was through conversation that the movie kind of came out. Had I written it alone, it would have never gone beyond the forty pages.

The fact that Ben and I had written the script didn't interfere at all. As a matter of fact, when it all started, there was almost a ceremonial handoff of the project. We said, "Look man, you are the director. This was our baby, it's yours now, go and do whatever it is you have to do." Despite the fact that Gus is a very communal director in that he wants everyone's opinions, which makes you feel you're part of the team, there can only be one chef in the kitchen when it comes to making a movie. Movies are the last great dictatorship. They need that. They need a strong voice, and a decisive voice, and the director is that voice. It has to be. Ben and I were very conscious about our place. As actors. When it started.

Before that was something else entirely (he laughs). Gus and Ben came down to Memphis while I was shooting The Rainmaker. As we were working on the script, Gus said, "I want Chuckie (the Ben Affleck character) to get flattened on a construction site. -- What do you mean? -- Killed. Crushed like a bug. I want somebody to say, 'Chuckie was killed, he was crushed like a bug.'" Ben and I said, "That's a terrible idea! You can't kill him! -- No, man. It'll be cool. It'll be the Act II climax. -- That's a terrible Act II climax."

Matt on The Talented Mr. Ripley at Urban Cinefile:

Everyone has a Dickie Greenleaf in his life, someone he admires to the point of idolatry," Damon says. "But Tom takes it even further and makes it obsessive. He finds himself in a brand new world, completely different from his own and it's all tied up with Dickie. He just wants his approval. But when it seems his dream is over and he's being ejected from this world, he becomes desperate. He loves Dickie and his life so much that he's actually compelled to take it.

From a People article about Dogma:

Also appearing in the film is Affleck's close friend, Matt Damon. Affleck says that "working with Matt has gotten a lot of publicity. With Good Will Hunting, it made a great publicity hook. In my limited experience, I've learned it's much more pleasurable to work with people you know and have a relationship with. That's why I like working with Kevin so much. This is my third film with him. Are me and Matt 'Martin and Lewis'? Sure! 'Matthau and Lemmon'? Why not! We have a new script that we're finishing this summer. I'm sure everyone will say, 'Oh, it's no Good Will Hunting' -- why would we write roles for anybody else? There's too much competition out there already. We wrote a role for Kevin, though. He plays the dim-witted neighbor, like a Mr. Roper."

From Kristen Busch's biography of Matt Damon, Golden Boy (page numbers are in parentheses):

By 1994, their living arrangements had shifted a bit. Instead of sleeping on Ben's couch, Matt was now sharing a West Hollywood house with a buddy named Soren. Ben, who had been living with his girlfriend of several years, showed up around this time. He and his girlfriend had broken up, Now it was Ben's turn on the sofa--which turned out to be very uncomfortable for his six-foot-four-inch frame. (54-55)

Matt Movie Fact: Always eager to work together, Ben tried to get a bit part in Courage Under Fire as an Iraqi. But because he was filming Chasing Amy at the same time, contract issues prevented him from appearing in the movie. (61)

Friend of Matt Fact: Both Ben and Matt hate flying, so the two make frequent cross-country road trips together. Ben always does the driving and the two make up stories and dialogue to keep him awake. There's a notebook in the glove compartment for Matt to take notes if anything interesting develops. Much of Good Will Hunting was written on these trips. They say they can make it from coast to coast in fifty-seven hours. (66)

Matt Fact: In another attempt at authenticity, Matt kept rocks under his suit to make him feel as uncomfortable as he should look in a particularly difficult deposition scene. (76)

Matt had auditioned for To Die For, but didn't get the role because the director thought he looked too "virile." (80)

Ben jokingly said, "This is especially significant for us to be here, especially since Matt and I got kicked out of this very theater more than once. It's nice to be allowed in." (95-96)

Matt and Ben felt like winners before they even arrived at the ceremony that night. Tuxedos were provided for them by famous designers. "Except for the rental fee," Ben said in People magazine, this is not unlike getting ready for the prom in high school." (104)

What does the future hold for Matt Damon? Well, he'll definitely be working with his best friend Ben Affleck again. The team has a two-picture contract with Miramax, one of which will be a buddy movie that they'll also write. Castle Rock, however, still own the rights to the duo's next creation. (125)

Matt Damon has achieved pretty much everything he set out to do, and then some: a successful career, love, support of a caring family, and a childhood friendship that grows stronger with every year (and movie) together. (127)

From a May 1998 article in Cleo, courtesy of Joanne:

Nobody told him about the travelling masseuse. Sure, Ben Affleck expected to learn a thing or two from his big-budget-movie debut, but he'd never before considered the lush world of star perks. Back when he was paying his low-budget-film dues, Affleck would have been more than happy just to get the house he has today. But now he hears of a new plateau of pampering.

"You have to get your people on it, Ben," says Affleck's schoolteacher mother, Chris, an energetic redhead of 54 who's visiting him on location in Florida from their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"Mom, *you're* my people," replies Affleck. Yes, he may be a broad-shouldered, up- and-thrusting actor, but 25-year-old Ben Affleck still has to handle certain earth-bound tasks himself. This particular Sunday sees him chauffeuring his mum around the Florida backwaters as well as Cape Canaveral, where he's filming his latest movie, Armageddon.

Affleck is especially close to his mother, who raised him alone after his father left when Ben was 12. Chris and her son are the inverse of what you'd expect a Hollywood parent- child relationship to be: there's no hint of dysfunction, despite the fact that they seem to be constantly scoring points off each other.

As he hits the highway, Affleck mutters that he'd just as soon drive for 20 hours straight, right to his hometown. For Affleck, who's burned rubber through more than 40 states, that kind of road trip is relaxation. But duty calls. Which means another week strapping himself into a space suit on the action-movie set lent out by the North American Space Agency (NASA). When that's over, Affleck - who's aviophobic - will fly out to California for more months of strenuous filming on oil rigs and soundstages.

Hang around with Ben Affleck for a couple of hours, though, and you get the impression that, mostly, he wants to talk. Even if the recipients of his charm are three shirtless urchins staging a curbside spitting contest outside a shop. "Everything all right, fellas?" says the lightly stubbled actor, drawing them into conversation. Next thing you know, he's causing a traffic jam by chatting up the cashier at a fast-food drive-through.

As Affleck drives away, sucking down his fourth diet soft drink of the day, his mother frowns. "You know, Ben," says Chris, "There are entire societies on the Internet devoted to that aspartame stuff they put in diet soda and the number of ways it can harm you."

"Mom," says Ben, "There're entire societies on the Internet devoted to proving there's a spaceship circling the earth, hiding behind a comet."

"There's an innocence about Ben, and a real strength," says Jerry Bruckheimer, who noticed a hormonal wave rippling through the typing pool when Affleck ambled in for his screen test. "And that's exactly what you need to play a heroic figure like AJ. You just can't fake that. He reminds me of Tom Cruise when he did Top Gun for us."

Ben Affleck's cinematic coming out occurred at the 1997 Sundance Festival, where he pulled off a fortuitous double whammy of acclaimed films. In Mark Wellington's Going All The Way, Affleck turned in a nuanced (and occasionally shirtless) performance as a GI returning from the Korean War with a backpack full of Zen. In Kevin Smith's glibly ribald Chasing Amy, he was charmingly self-deprecating as Holden, a cartoonist who's besotted with a Sapphic firecracker named Alyssa. Somehow, in the course of his pursuit, the poor chump ends up smooching his good buddy, Banky.
The whirlwind of attention around the young actor was further intensified by the buzz on the big-money script Good Will Hunting which he wrote with fellow up-and-thruster Matt Damon.

"We originally wanted a movie that was a showcase, a cheap exercise," says Affleck in- between bickering with his mum over her map-reading abilities. "So we thought to ourselves, What could we do that other people couldn't? Which is why we decided to do something about Boston.

This is something we know how to do, having grown up there. We know how to get the accent and the attitude."

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon grew up blocks apart in Cambridge; their mothers were friends. When they met, Affleck was eight and Damon 10. Affleck was a "charming bastard" even then, Damon recalls. By Affleck's account, the family home was a turbulent place until, when he was 12, his father left. "I was kind of relieved," admits Affleck, whose dad later conquered his drinking problem at the California rehab facility where he now works as a counselor.

The word, "winners" would not have been used to describe Affleck and Damon in their LA digs, a two-bedroom house shared with another friend. Affleck, a relationship refugee, was sleeping on the couch with all his stuff piled around him.

When Affleck and Damon came up with the idea for Good Will Hunting, the main impetus was to write their way out of that dumb and the C-list roles with which they were stuck. They could never have guessed how far up the Hollywood food chain it would send them. In a movie-like moment, the two were sharing a pay phone when they first heard of the absurdly favourable industry response to their script - like six-figure absurd. "We just fucking stood there screaming," recalls Damon.

At a gas station along the highway, Affleck picks up a John Denver tape. He wants to hear "Leaving On A Jet Plane" to prepare for an Armageddon "moment" when he croons the song in a bit of prelaunch levity. Affleck sings along to the tape, blithely ignoring his mum's disparaging comments about his sense of pitch. If he is the slightest bit concerned about the pressure on him to assume the role of late '90s action hero, he deserves an Oscar for the way he's hiding it.

Affleck has just left his on-off girlfriend of a dozen years back in the Hollywood Hills house that the Armageddon production has rented for him while he's filming on the West Coast. (The couple will be off again within the month, with Affleck soon finding solace in the arms of Gwyneth Paltrow). Having relinquished the lease on the New York apartment he shared with Damon, Affleck has drifted into statelessness, that uniquely casual modus vivendi that seems to come with a certain level of acting success.

"Since I'm running around so much, I don't really have the leisure time to look around and wonder, 'Now where did I put that badminton set?'." Affleck says as he drives toward the late-afternoon sun in search of a watering hole.

His attire continues to draw attention from the brunchers inside, but Affleck remains oblivious. "We got into this conversation on the set of Armageddon," says Affleck, easing into one of the Polo Lounge's plush banquettes. "I asked everyone, 'How much would you charge to give some guy a blow job? What's your price?' Their initial reaction is "Oh no, no way!' Then after a while it's like, 'Do I have to swallow?'"

"We're talking a briefcase full of cash," says the man who was paid approximately $7,000 for his big Chasing Amy kiss. "So where do you draw the line? Would you do it for $12 million? Fuck, yes! You're kidding - I'd do it for less. And yet $12 million is probably what Keanu passed up to do Speed 2. People scoff at the roles actors take. But who am I to judge? I've just admitted I'll suck dick for cash in front of a roomful of people."

Affleck orders an orange juice to soothe his ragged throat, the better to address charges that he's selling out. "People say, 'How can you do this movie? You're the indie guy.' I take it that they're conferring some kind of integrity on me when they say that. But when I was growing up, I liked Star Wars and Lethal Weapon. I thought Back To The Future was the best film I saw that year. I am not a kid who was weaned on Fellini."

From a magazine, August, 2000:

Uh, oh, trouble lurks between mates Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who are being called Hollywood's new "Odd Couple". It's over Matt's sloppy behaviour when he stays at Ben's pad in the Hollywood Hills, which he does a lot since splitting with Winona Ryder. Ben's getting mighty irritated with Matt doing all those usual repulsive things like leaving dirty dishes in the sink and towels on the floor. In fact the tension's reached such a pitch that messy Matt's looking for his own place.

From Ben's interview in Playboy:

PLAYBOY: Do you ever get tired of talking about your friendship with Matt?
AFFLECK: I understand the questions. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, they're friends, they're pals, they grew up together, isn't it great and cute? I get all kinds of questions, like, "So how's Matt?" or "What's Matt like?" And I don't know what sort of answers are expected.
Instead of saying Matt's fine and he's doing his thing, I'll be like, "Well, let me tell you about Matt. Matt can give a blow job in a way that's incredible, really special." Most of the time it's like Entertainnent Tonight, and they can't air it. But then sometimes you think you're safe, but someone writes it down and it ends up being taken out of context in Out magazine.
PLAYBOY: Does Matt ever get pissed off about that?
AFFLECK: Matt gets it. We have a similar sense of humor, which I think is the main reason we're compatible as friends and in terms of writing. He always thinks it's funny. It's just a question of the rest of them.
PLAYBOY: Let's see if you've learned your lesson: What is Matt Damon really like?
AFFLECK: [Laughs] He gives a really great blow job."

From E! Online:

Audiences are fickle, famous girlfriends are transitory--but Matt and Ben are eternal.

From YM's "50 Things You Never Knew About Ben Affleck":

25) Big fame is starting to take its toll: Ben complains he never gets to see Matt anymore.

From Biography magazine's article on Ben Affleck:

"It was easy to fall into playing old buddies who have been kicking around on Earth together for eons, because that’s how we feel about each other," Damon explained. "We’ve been through a lot together; we’ve had some exciting times and some pretty boring ones, so we can imagine spending eternity in Wisconsin together."

From Gus Van Sant's introduction to the Good Will Hunting screenplay:

It's obvious that these words come from a soulful place. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are describing things in their screenplay that mean so much to them that it will break your heart when you read it. It is surprising that two boys of their age (twenty-four and twenty-six [when intro was written]) can speak so wisely about the human condition. They care so much about their lives, their friendships, and each other that I suppose all this humanity just pops out of them - somewhat like mathematical answers pop out of the shy mathematical genius character they have named Will. The creators have put together this story with such flawles clarity of purpose in their characters and with seemingly so little sweat that I consider them sort-of geniuses themselves for pulling it off.

Back to The Slashy Side of Matt and Ben.