The production that offended Matt Damon just by existing: “Well, fuck everybody”
Although he doesn’t have a problem with theatre as an art form, there was one play that offended Matt Damon by its mere existence, even if it provided a significant leg-up for its co-creator’s career.
Befitting their shared trajectory, neither Damon nor his Good Will Hunting co-writer and lifelong best friend, Ben Affleck, has shown a particularly vested interest in treading the boards. In fact, the latter hasn’t performed on the stage since his high school days, on which front the former has him beat, if only by a little.
Admittedly, Damon isn’t quite Boston’s very own Mark Rylance, with his only major contribution to the theatre since he cracked Hollywood in the late 1990s coming when he starred opposite the other Affleck, Casey, in a 2002 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth in London’s West End.
It served a purpose, though, introducing him to the playwright and filmmaker, and they’d go on to enjoy a complicated professional relationship that weathered the lows of Margaret and the highs of Manchester by the Sea, but it mustn’t have been a fulfilling enough experience to tempt Damon back onto the stage.
However, there was a play that he was very aware of, and he wasn’t exactly thrilled about it. The same year that he was strutting his stuff in the English capital, Brenda Withers played him in the off-Broadway show, Matt & Ben, which she’d devised alongside Mindy Kaling, who played Affleck.
It gained Kaling plenty of notice and served as the catalyst behind her comedic ascension throughout the rest of the decade, but a semi-fictionalised dramedy about how the two BFFs concocted their Academy Award-winning story didn’t sit too well with either of its key players, especially the plot device that was used to signify the exact moment they stumbled upon the idea.
“I just remember somebody telling me that the premise is that the screenplay falls out of the sky,” he told Boston Magazine. That’s true; in Matt & Ben, Withers and Kaling leaned into the unsubstantiated rumours that the duo hadn’t written Good Will Hunting themselves, with the script literally dropping on their heads when they’re hanging out in their shared abode.
What was Damon’s reaction? “I just remember thinking, ‘Well, just fuck everybody.'” The play was one of 2002’s most talked-about original productions, and he couldn’t do anything but stew over being mercilessly mocked. Instead, he had to bite his tongue, and things could have gotten interesting on the set of Ocean’s 8, when he shot a scrapped cameo for a spinoff that starred Kaling in a key role.
Unlike Damon, Affleck has seen it, and Kaling revealed that “he’s not crazy about it,” telling her at a party they both attended how “you still owe me residuals from that play you did.” At least he was a good sport, whereas the Bourne figurehead couldn’t do anything other than quietly fume.
