Matt Damon recently revealed how he has maintained his friendship with Ben Affleck for more than 4 decades.
“I think starting out as an actor, you have to feel that way a little bit. You have to because the odds are so long against you,” Damon told PEOPLE in a new interview. “I think Ben and I bolstered each other when we were young. We were in our teens and we were coming down here to New York on the train or on the bus to audition for things, for ‘The Mickey Mouse Club.’ We were the only people who believed in each other. We had families, but they weren’t in the entertainment business.”
“We were the only people who felt like we had a little foot in this door who said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to make it,’” he told the magazine. “And I think you need to have that kind of defy-the-odds mentality to go into this life because it’s a bit of the circus life and it’s not a normal way to go.”
Apart from their work in entertainment, the pair is experiencing feelings many parents do, apparently talking about their upcoming empty-nest years “all the time,” Damon told the magazine.
Not only have Affleck and Damon kept their friendship alive for more than four decades, it has since evolved from childhood buddies into long‑term creative collaborators. Their work together spans films like “Dogma,” “Air,” “The Last Duel,” and most recently, the Netflix release “The Rip.” In 2022, they even launched a production company called Artists Equity.
“It doesn’t take much to get us emotional at this point,” Damon reportedly said with a chuckle. “We’re at very similar stages with the kids and it’s definitely a new phase of life. It was one of the reasons we started the company, getting into our 50s and going, ‘This is the time to do this. We’re young enough to have the energy to do it and old enough to appreciate why we should do it and to make really good movies with our friends and with people we want to work with.’”
How Damon and Affleck First Became Friends
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s friendship began when they were kids in Cambridge, Massachusetts, back in 1980, PEOPLE previously reported. They later attended the same high school and shared a love of acting. This pushed them to audition side‑by‑side throughout their teens, eventually leading them to write “Good Will Hunting,” which won an Academy Award.
“Our dreams came true and the greatest disservice we could do to our younger selves would be to not work together,” he told the publication.
“Well the circumstances of our lives have changed a lot and obviously we’ve gone through different phases of life, having kids, so those things are vastly different but I feel like who we are as people was kind of established together a long time ago in our adolescence and teens and those things have been pretty consistent,” Damon further elaborated in a previous PEOPLE interview.
The pair’s next Hollywood collaboration will see Damon serving as a producer for a forthcoming movie starring Affleck, as well as Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson, PEOPLE reported.
