Summary
- Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting because they weren't getting the roles they wanted in Hollywood, proving that sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands to achieve success.
- The fame and recognition that came with the success of Good Will Hunting changed Damon's life, making it difficult to determine who his true friends were. He had to take drastic measures to identify his genuine friends and protect himself from those who treated him differently.
- Damon's work and his family were his anchors during his chaotic and overwhelming journey into stardom. He realized the rarity of true friendships and recognized that many people were only interested in him because of his fame.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote the script for Good Will Hunting because they were not being offered the roles they wanted in Hollywood. As a result of taking matters into their own hands, instead of remaining struggling actors, the two best friends penned themselves a script that they knew was good, starting a trend of working in films together with varying salaries between them. However, it was not until Damon and Affleck won an Oscar for their screenwriting skills that they recognized just how brilliant their script was and how foolish it was to listen to people who told them to not collaborate over the years.
The recognition of the hard work it took to write a script of the caliber of Good Will Hunting did not initially bother Damon and Affleck. But the more their faces were plastered on magazines, and they were followed by paparazzi to see who they were dating, life began to feel surreal. At that point, it was hard to tell who was in the group of friends strictly for friendship and who was there because of an ulterior motive. Because of this, drastic measures were taken to shrink the inner circle so that Damon knew who his true friends were, even if this meant hiring extras to pose as friends when necessary.
Matt Damon's Fame After 'Good Will Hunting' Changed His Life
After the release of Good Will Hunting, Damon was no longer able to be an anonymous face in Los Angeles, despite the fact he and Affleck were broke after the film was released.
He became one of the most recognized celebrities of the late 1990s.
Were he unable to rely on Affleck to try to navigate a new normal, Damon may have been swallowed up whole by the same industry that he was determined to make a living in.
"It's been really helpful to check in with Ben throughout this whole surreal process over the last 25 years," Damon explained.
"I think the shock of becoming famous is so... I mean, that messed me up for a couple years because the whole world just starts to treat you differently. And so your subjective experience changes. It's like somebody rewrites your code in the Matrix, but just your code."
Damon went on to say, "It's like, 'Oh, my whole experience has been altered in this really overwhelming way.' And so to have somebody who I've known my whole life who I can be like, 'Hey man, is this happening to you? Are you…?' And to check in with him, it was really, really helpful. Stabilizing."
While Damon had Affleck in his life since childhood, he knew he was a trusted and dear friend. But the same could not be said for the others in Damon's life claiming to be friends but doing nothing but treat him differently instead.
Matt Damon Was Treated Differently By Friends
Once Damon became a superstar overnight, people began to change. Be it people who Damon had grown up with or newer friends in Hollywood, relationships began to shift.
Because of this, Damon was grateful he had his family and his work to fall back on to ground him during one of the most chaotic times of his life.
"Everybody treats you differently," Damon explained. "So the world is the same, but your world is absolutely different, and never will be the same again. I’d always heard people say, 'Well, you can’t prepare for it, it just is something that you have to kind of deal with.' And everybody deals with it with whatever tools they have, whatever their foundation is, and I was very lucky to have the family that I had."
Damon further stated, "I think I hid — my work really saved me because I was able to still be an actor. Movie crews don’t care about any of this nonsense, they just want to work. … Work kind of shielded me..."
But it was when Damon appeared for a photo shoot in which he was supposed to be surrounded by his friends, only to find extras instead, that life took a truly bizarre turn for the Oppenheimer star.
Extras Were Hired To Be Matt Damon's Friends
Once Damon became a household name, he recognized just how rare it was to have true friends. And he saw this play out in real-time as he was setting up for a photo shoot to play football with said friends, only to find that everyone on set was an extra.
"You have no idea how rare true friendships are," Damon explained. "Of course people are saying nice stuff to me every day in order to start a conversation. But that doesn't really have a lot to do with true friendship."
"With time you do start to develop a real sense for realizing when someone is really interested in you or when they just want to know you because you're famous."
Before reaching the level of fame that Good Will Hunting brought Damon, finding a group to play a game of football would have been fairly easy to do. But when reflecting on set with a bunch of extras hired to be his friends playing football in the mud for a photo shoot, Damon recognized just how crazy his life had actually become.
"I remember thinking it was kind of the peak of the surreality because they had to hire fake friends,” Damon told Off Camera. "I remember just thinking, 'This is ...crazy. What is going on with my life?' They’ve literally hired extras to play my friends and pretend to have a good time with me."
Fortunately, Damon would figure out how to navigate his life post-Good Will Hunting fame. In the aftermath, he has flourished by surrounding himself with down-to-earth people in his inner circle that are anything but fake friends.
