Matt Damon on That Time He and Ben Affleck Missed Out on Roles in 'Dead Poets Society'
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in 2015 (Photo: Paul A. Hebert/Invision/AP, File)
As the old maxim goes, “what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.” And according to Matt Damon, few career disappointments were as great, or ultimately as instructional, as the first big film role he failed to nab.
In a recent EW SiriusXM Town Hall interview, the Jason Bourne star revealed that no missed opportunity has stung quite as badly as Dead Poets Society, the 1989 Peter Weir-directed film starring Robin Williams as an unconventional prep school teacher who fights the establishment in order to inspire his students. According to Damon, both he and Boston pal Ben Affleck were up for lead parts in the project, and even “got called back on that.” Nonetheless, they were ultimately passed by in favor of other actors (possibly Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke?) It was a letdown made all the more painful by the circumstances of their summer jobs.
“When it came out, Ben and I worked at a movie theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the one movie they played all summer was Dead Poets Society,” laughed Damon. “And we had to sit there in our black pants, white shirt, maroon vest, black bow tie, sit there, tearing tickets, serving popcorn, and then watch people bawling their eyes out as they came out. And we’re like, ‘That could have been us.’”
Robin Williams and the boys from ‘Dead Poets Society’ (Everett)
It wouldn’t take too long for Damon and Affleck to get their own shot at starring in a prep school drama, as the two would share the screen opposite Brendan Fraser in 1992’s School Ties. And for Damon, it proved a valuable lesson in the way Hollywood works.
“There are the experiences that — they either crush you or they inure you to the realities of this business, and for us it made us more determined.”
You can listen to Damon’s entire Dead Poets Society chat at EW.com.
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