Matt Damon called Ben Affleck his best friend during an appearance on the New Heights podcast, hosted by brothers Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce, on August 6, 2026. The two have known each other since childhood, long before either of them became famous, and the story Damon told about how their careers actually took off says a lot about how little that fame guaranteed at first.
Good Will Hunting started as a final project for one of Damon's college classes, and it earned him an A. After Damon lost out on a role in the 1996 film Primal Fear to Edward Norton, he and Affleck decided to turn that old script into something real, writing and eventually starring in it together. The film came out in 1997 and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, with the two friends selling the script itself for 600,000 dollars.
That number sounds like more than it turned out to be. Damon has explained that after splitting the money and paying taxes, agents, and lawyers, the two of them ended up with under 150,000 dollars apiece. They spent some of it on Jeep Grand Cherokees and rented an expensive place in Los Angeles, the kind of moves that made sense if you believed, as Damon has said they did at the time, that you would never have to work again.
That belief did not last. It did not take long for us to be like, dude, we gotta get another job, Damon recalled, and by his own account they were broke again within a year of winning an Oscar. Decades later, the friendship that survived that whole cycle, broke, then briefly rich, then broke again, has outlasted just about every other detail of the story, which may be why Damon still calls Affleck his best friend before he calls him anything else.