The embarrassing 2003 movie Matt Damon was smart enough to turn down: “It’s all bullshit”
The lifelong love affair between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck ensures they’ll always be mentioned in the same breath, but for a long time, it looked as though one had their head screwed on tighter than the other.
After initially going their separate ways in the 1990s, having become overnight sensations after Good Will Hunting won the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, it became clear that while Damon fancied himself as an actor, Affleck seemed more preoccupied with becoming a movie star.
All you need to look at is the films they made in the aftermath to reach that conclusion: Damon made The Rainmaker with Francis Ford Coppola, Saving Private Ryan with Steven Spielberg, The Talented Mr Ripley with Anthony Minghella, and even The Legend of Bagger Vance, despite being crap, gave him the opportunity to be directed by Robert Redford.
Affleck’s first post-Good Will Hunting outing came in the sci-fi horror Phantoms, which flopped, even though he was the bomb in it. After that, he teamed with Michael Bay for Armageddon and Pearl Harbor and stuck with tedious genre fare by boarding Reindeer Games opposite Charlize Theron, which she regrets to this day.
By the early 2000s, Damon had reinvented himself as the thinking man’s action hero, reinventing the genre in the process, in The Bourne Identity, while Affleck torpedoed the Jack Ryan franchise in The Sum of All Fears, sent John Woo scurrying away from Hollywood with his tail between his legs in Paycheck, and decided that starring opposite Jennifer Lopez in Gigli was a good idea.
It would be an understatement to say they experienced mixed fortunes when their paths diverged, but on the plus side, Affleck has since bounced back. However, Damon dived out of the way of a bullet that struck his platonic life partner squarely in the chest when he was offered the title role in 2003’s Daredevil.
Casting his mind back to that period, the star bristled at the ongoing comparisons between the two. “The reality is that if Michael Bay had offered me Armageddon when Good Will Hunting was in the can, which was when Ben got offered that role, I would have taken it, too,” he explained. “I would have taken any job that any director offered me at that point. And if Ben had been offered Saving Private Ryan he would have done it, but suddenly I became the serious one. It’s all bullshit.”
Damon wasn’t done there, either. “I would have done Daredevil,” he declared. “Ben and I loved that comic book, but I just didn’t quite believe in the script or the director at the time.” The character was their shared favourite superhero, but Damon’s concerns over writer and director Mark Steven Johnson’s lack of credentials convinced him that it wasn’t the right move.
Obviously, Affleck had no such concerns, and for the last 20 years, he’s shit all over the superhero blockbuster whenever he’s had the chance. His overriding memory of the experience was a frank, “I hate Daredevil so much,” and it’s haunted him ever since. If he had the same mindset as Damon, he too could have avoided the debacle entirely.
