Nearly thirty years ago, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon shocked the world—and themselves—by winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting. The duo genuinely didn’t expect to hear their names called, and while their acceptance speech was enthusiastic and heartfelt, it was also… a little all over the place. Looking back now, it’s a moment they remember with more than a bit of embarrassment.
Ben Affleck & Matt Damon On Good Will Hunting Oscar
“Oh, god,” Affleck said on The Howard Stern Show when asked about the Oscar win. “I just feel so… like, I thanked Boston as a city three times. Was that necessary?“
According to Damon, the rambling nature of the speech came down to one simple reason: they never actually planned for the possibility of winning. “The funny thing about it, actually,” Damon explained, “the reason it’s kind of disorganized was because we never ever had a conversation between ourselves about what we would say. Because honestly, each of us knew deep down that if we had that conversation and didn’t win, in 50 years we’d be at some bar in Boston going, ‘Can you f’ing believe we f’ing wrote an Oscars speech? You jackass.’ So when we got up there, I remember I pushed Ben into the microphone. I was like, ‘I’m not doing it.’”
Affleck recalled the moment just as vividly. “I’m like, ‘What am I supposed to say?’” he said, adding, “So I do, in some ways, think it would have been smart to think a little bit about what I was going to say in front of the whole world.”
The surreal nature of the experience only amplified the nerves. Just a year earlier, Affleck and Damon had been watching the Academy Awards from a cramped apartment—outsiders looking in. “The year before that Oscars, we watched the show in Somerville, Mass., in a little apartment like everybody else, just totally on the outside,” Affleck said. “So it still felt like we were the people watching the show who, all of a sudden, the screen opened up and you walked into it, like one of those weird dreams.”
Affleck & Damon Return in The RIP
The Good Will Hunting buds are set to reunite again in The RIP, an action thriller from director Joe Carnahan, which finds loyalties getting tested when a team of cops finds itself unsure of who to trust after stumbling upon millions of dollars in cash during a raid. The film is set to debut on
