Ben Affleck revealed that he and Matt Damon went broke six months after selling their screenplay for “Good Will Hunting.”
During a Friday appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” the 50-year-old recalled his early days in Hollywood when he and his childhood friend Matt Damon were struggling actors trying to land their big breaks.
After the two sold the script for the 1997 psychological drama, Affleck told Barrymore that he believed they were “rich for life.”
“My needs are over. I will never have to work again,” the “Argo” star recalled thinking at the time. “I’m rich forever.”
Affleck then broke down exactly how the two quickly blew through their “Good Will Hunting” windfall.
“We sold it for $600,000, we split that, $300,000 each, and then the agents got $30,000 so we had $270,000 and we paid about $160,000 in taxes so we had $110,000, each bought $55,000 Jeep Cherokees and then had $55,000 left,” he said.
“Naturally we decided to rent a $5,000-a-month party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl and we were broke in six months.”
However, neither of the actors were permanently derailed by the setback. In addition to writing the screenplay for “Good Will Hunting,” the pair also starred in the film. Damon’s performance earned him a best actor Academy Award and the two both took home Oscars for best original screenplay.
After the movie’s success, Affleck and Damon went on to cement their status as Hollywood A-listers.
During his appearance on “The Drew Barrymore Show,” the California native recalled that he and Damon shared a bank account into their 20s.
“I always thought it was perfectly normal,” Affleck admitted as Barrymore and the audience laughed.
“We wanted to be actors,” he explained. “We were in Boston, and then we would go to New York and, you know, take the train up to New York and pay for that and [we] had to go audition because that’s where you could audition.”
Affleck continued, “We would work a little bit. We would do extra work or a line here or there, the occasional Burger King commercial, and then take that money and put it in the account.”
“We were friends, and we wanted each other to succeed, and we love each other,” he added. “And so it seemed like, let’s do this together. And it’s actually, in retrospect, really valuable because I think kind of starting out in a field like that can feel very lonely.”
In a March interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Affleck explained why he mostly avoided working with his longtime friend for years after “Good Will Hunting.”
“We fell prey to this idea that, ‘Well, if you don’t individuate your careers and do your own things, people will always associate you together. That will be limiting,’” he said.
“That was advice we got.”
Affleck and Damon did appear in a handful of films together throughout the years, and co-created the HBO filmmaking series “Project Greenlight,” but after “Good Will Hunting” they didn’t collaborate for quite some time until they appeared together in Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel” in 2021.
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“The motivation behind making ‘Good Will Hunting’ was to serve as an acting reel so that we could get jobs as actors, not because we wanted to be writers,” he said. “So when we became successful and had the opportunity to do movies, we took them.”
“And it’s very hard to let go of that hand-to-mouth mentality you have as an actor,” he continued. “The phone could stop ringing at any time, and especially where Matt and I grew up pretty modestly, it was almost irresponsible to not take a job where they were going to pay you a lot of money.”
In November, Affleck and Damon launched their new production company, Artists Equity. In his interview with THR, the “Air” director reflected on their friendship of almost 40 years.
“I suppose the reason it works is that I trust him and love him, and I know that this is somebody with integrity,” he said. “In this business, failure is hard, and success is confusing and can make you lose your bearings. Having that friendship as a touchstone over the years was really meaningful.”
Fox News Digital’s Stephanie Nolasco contributed to this report.
