Ben Affleck and Matt Damon blew all their Good Will Hunting money in 6 months on a party house and Jeeps

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon blew all their Good Will Hunting money in 6 months on a party house and Jeeps
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Ben Affleck and Matt Damon managed to blow through $600,000 in six months. How do you like them apples?

Before sharing a Best Original Screenplay Oscar win, the longtime pals and collaborators shared a bank account, but once the struggling young actors and writers deposited their check for selling the script for Good Will Hunting, it wasn't long before they maxed out their joint savings.

"When we sold Good Will Hunting I was like, 'We are now rich for life. My needs are over. I will never have to work again,'" Affleck said during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show this week.

Then he broke down just how quickly that turned out not to be the case: "We sold it for $600,000, we split that, $300,000 each, and then the agents got $30,000. So we had $270,000, and we paid about $160,000 in taxes, so we had $110,000, each bought $55,000 Jeep Cherokees, and then had $55,000 left, which naturally we decided to rent a $5,000-a-month party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl, and we were broke in six months."

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at the 'Good Will Hunting' premiere in 1997
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at the 'Good Will Hunting' premiere in 1997

Mitchell Gerber/Corbis/VCG/Getty Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at the 'Good Will Hunting' premiere in 1997

"I always thought it was perfectly normal," Affleck told host Drew Barrymore of sharing an account with his best bro. "We would work a little bit. We would do extra work, or a line here and there — the occasional Burger King commercial — and then take that money and put it in the account… We were friends and we wanted each other to succeed and we love each other, so it seemed clear like, 'Let's do this together,' and in retrospect, really valuable because I think kind of starting out in a field like that can feel very lonely."

Before their party rental, the actors lived together in a more modest apartment in Los Angeles' Eagle Rock neighborhood, where they wrote the prize-winning screenplay. Affleck recently shared his struggles with Damon during that period.

"I would not suggest living with him," Affleck said on The Late Late Show earlier this month, explaining that he and younger brother Casey Affleck once went on a cleaning strike to see how long it would take Damon to pick up after himself.

"Came home one day, me and [Casey]. Matt's there in his shorts and his T-shirt playing the '92 Sega hockey game in the middle of what was the living room, just surrounded by concentric circles of garbage," Affleck said. "Pizza boxes. I look down at this sushi thing that was a week and a half old, and there's maggots."

Affleck and Damon haven't cohabitated in decades, but they can be seen together in Air, which the former also directed, in theaters now.

Watch Affleck's Drew Barrymore Show appearance above.

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