The scrapped death scene that could have forever changed Ben Affleck’s career
Platonic life partners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon may have both had acting careers prior to the release of Good Will Hunting, but neither of them would even try to deny that they owe everything they currently have to the movie.
Having gone on a Sylvester Stallone-like odyssey through countless studios to ensure they’d be able to play major roles on camera and retain credit as screenwriters, the duo’s persistence paid off handsomely when Gus Van Sant’s drama became one of the biggest hits of 1997.
Good Will Hunting recouped its budget more than 20 times over at the box office, infiltrated pop culture, won Robin Williams an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, earned another eight nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, and rewarded Affleck and Damon with the prize for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
They were only 25 and 27 years old at the time, and Affleck remains the youngest person ever to win that particular Oscar more than three decades later. A couple of years later, the Bostonian best friends were everywhere, but things could have turned out very different for the future Batman had they acquiesced to Van Sant’s bizarre demand that Chuckie Sullivan be killed off.
“Gus and Ben came down to Memphis while I was shooting The Rainmaker,” Damon recalled to Film Scouts. “As we were working on the script, Gus said, ‘I want Chuckie to get flattened on a construction site’. What do you mean? ‘Killed. Crushed like a bug. I want somebody to say, ‘Chuckie was killed; he was crushed like a bug’. Ben and I said, ‘That’s a terrible idea! You can’t kill him!'”
Regardless of how bad an idea they knew it to be, they went ahead and did anyway as one of the many drafts Good Will Hunting cycled through on its journey towards the screen. When they presented the Van Sant-requested alterations to the filmmaker, he immediately understood the pair’s hesitance.
“When Gus read it, he said, ‘It’s a terrible idea’, so we threw it out,” Damon explained. “We probably have it on our hard drive somewhere. We also have Will getting killed on our hard drive somewhere. That was an original ending.” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and everyone realised it was in their best interests not to mess up the screenwriters’ original vision too much.
Would Affleck have experienced as much post-Good Will Hunting success as he did were Chuckie to be killed off at the end of the second act? It’s debatable. Damon would have been just fine as the title character, but by the time the story reached its resolution, there was a distinct possibility that poor Chuckie, who’d been squashed like a bug, would end up as little more than an afterthought.
