Matt Damon and Ben Affleck might be some of the biggest movie stars around now, but they weren’t always so successful. Affleck and Damon met as children growing up together in Cambridge, MA, and first became close when they were in high school, partially because they had the same interests (especially a desire to act).
The duo have spoken about their start often, doing so in a March 22 episode of “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” Damon and Affleck revealed that in addition to sharing an apartment early on in their careers, they also had a joint bank account.
“It was unusual, but we needed the money for auditions,” Damon said, calling it “a weird thing in retrospect.” Still, he said, “As long as one of us had money, we knew that the power wasn’t going to get shut off. I remember after doing ‘Geronimo,’ I was like, f*ck, I probably had like 35 grand in the bank,” he continued. “I was like [to Affleck], ‘We’re good! We’re good for a year!'” The pair also apparently held each other to a strict budget. “You were allowed to take out $10 and get quarters and go to [the arcade] and play video games,” Damon said. “Eventually, we were allowed to try to buy beer, which never f*cking worked.”
Even still, Affleck shared that he felt he and Damon learned a lot from their penny-pinching days. “I think that attitude really helped us in ways we couldn’t anticipate,” he said. “Matt and I always felt like we’re in it together. Like, ‘Hey, I want to get the part, but I want you to get the part [too].”
Famously, after a few years as working actors — including some movies together — the duo collaborated on the script for “Good Will Hunting,” and the rest is history. The movie became a smash success, with rave reviews not just for their performances but also for the screenplay they wrote together, which won them an Oscar. In the years since, Affleck and Damon have teamed up for even more movies, including “Dogma,” “The Last Duel,” and this year’s “Air,” which Affleck directed. In 2022, they launched a production company together, so we can expect even more Affleck-Damon collabs in the future.
Back in July, Damon reflected on how much he actually loved being directed by his best friend. “You can waste so much time by trying to be polite,” Damon said of working on film sets during an interview with “Sunday Today.” No one wants to tell someone directly that they’re doing a bad job, he explained. But it’s not like that with Affleck.
“We can just say, ‘You suck,'” Damon joked. “Which is really a gift because you get through the bullsh*t faster and you go, ‘How do we fix it?'”
The duo have stayed close friends through the years, supporting each other as they both became fathers and navigated their marriages. “This friendship has been essential and defining and so important to me in my life,” Affleck told Damon in a January 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There were a few critical times, which are private and I don’t want to share, but where your support was so profoundly meaningful to me that I don’t think I would’ve been able to be successful without it.”
Ahead are the nine movies Damon and Affleck have appeared in together, in chronological order.