How Matt Damon Relied on Friend Ben Affleck as He Came to Terms with Fame (Exclusive)
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“The shock of becoming famous…that messed me up for a couple years,” says Damon, who costars with longtime friend Affleck in the new movie Air
Matt Damon is opening up about his bond with Ben Affleck.
In the new issue of PEOPLE, Damon, who costars with his longtime friend in the new movie Air, reveals how he leaned on Affleck after they rocketed to fame more than two decades ago following the success of their 1997 drama Good Will Hunting.
Calling their friendship "everything to me," Damon, 52, tells PEOPLE that his life would be "unimaginably harder" without Affleck, 50, his cowriter and costar in the film.
"It's been really helpful to check in with Ben throughout this whole surreal process over the last 25 years. I think the shock of becoming famous is so... I mean, that messed me up for a couple years," says Damon, who shares daughters Isabella, 16, Gia, 14, and Stella, 12 with wife Luciana. He is also stepfather to Luciana's daughter Alexia, 24.
Related:Ben Affleck and Matt Damon Once Shared a Bank Account for Auditions: 'We Needed the Money'
"Because the whole world just starts to treat you differently. And so your subjective experience changes. It's like somebody rewrites your code in the Matrix, but just your code," continues Damon.
"It's like, 'Oh, my whole experience has been altered in this really overwhelming way.' And so to have somebody who I've known my whole life who I can be like, 'Hey man, is this happening to you? Are you…?' And to check in with him, it was really, really helpful. Stabilizing."
Affleck, who is wed to Jennifer Lopez, 53, and shares children Violet, 17, Seraphina, 14, and Samuel, 11, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner, agreed that they share a special connection.
"Having Matt has meant the world," says Affleck, also a stepfather to Lopez's 15-year-old twins Emme and Max. "It's not just Matt. It's Matt's dad who I adore and love enormously. He passed away recently. And his mom and stepdad, his brother. His kids, who just came to the premiere and made me want to burst into tears because they're so beautiful and grown up and amazing. You get to be part of somebody's whole life in that way. It's been an enormous gift."
Affleck and Damon met at the respective ages of 8 and 10 years old when they lived two blocks away from one another in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They became fast friends when they discovered that they each loved baseball and acting.
Damon recalled in a November 2019 interview on Conan that his friendship with Affleck was solidified after Affleck, at the very last minute, defended Damon in a fight with a bigger kid in school. "I remember that was like a big moment," Damon said at the time. "He will put himself in a really bad spot for me. This is a good friend."
As teens, they traveled to New York to audition together. "We'd take the train. Or sometimes we'd even take the airplane, back when there was the Eastern Shuttle or People's Express," Affleck recalled in an interview with Parade. "It cost like $20 to fly and you could smoke on the plane," Affleck said. "We were smoking like idiots because we thought we were really supposed to be grown-ups. It was pitiful."
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They both landed uncredited parts as extras in the Kevin Costner hit Field of Dreams. "I bet there were probably 3,000 extras in a big crowd scene when Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones are at the baseball game," Damon said on The Dan Patrick Show in July 2021.
"Costner came out and hung out with the extras, and Ben and I went and struck up a conversation with him," he continued. "And he probably gave us five minutes. He was incredibly generous with his time."
They went on to costar in the 1992 movie School Ties before writing Good Will Hunting together, winning the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
"We were younger than we felt," Damon later recalled of the big moment to Boston Magazine. "I was 22 and Ben was 20 when we first started writing it. And then it came out when I was 27 and Ben was 25. I mean, Ben's still the youngest writer to ever win an Oscar for screenwriting."
Watch the full episode of People Features: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon & Chris Tucker below
Their new film Air tells the story of how Nike co-founder Phil Knight (Affleck) and executives Howard White (Chris Tucker) and Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) bet their company's future to persuade then-NBA rookie Michael Jordan to partner with them.
Air is now playing in theaters.
For more on Damon and Affleck's friendship, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE.
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Read the original article on People.
