Matt Damon Said The Beatles’ Breakup Made Him Tear Up Because He Thought About Ben Affleck
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have worked together many times over the years. While Damon noted that people might get sick of their frequent collaborations, he doesn’t care. When he watched The Beatles: Get Back, he felt moved to tears because he couldn’t imagine never working with Affleck again. Damon said it convinced him that he needed to keep collaborating with his longtime friend.
Matt Damon said The Beatles made him want to keep working with Ben Affleck
In 2021, Peter Jackson released The Beatles: Get Back, a documentary series about the making of Let It Be. At the end of the series, there is a title card that notes that the full band never worked together again. Damon said this moved him to tears, and he realized he didn’t want that to happen with him and Affleck.
“Who cares if we oversaturate the marketplace with movies we’re both in?” Damon told GQ. “We’re crazy if we don’t take advantage of the fact that we are both still here and able to do this.”
Affleck and Damon famously collaborated on Good Will Hunting in 1997. After a lengthy break, they reunited in 2021 when they both appeared in The Last Duel. Since then, they both appeared in Air and will star in The Rip in 2026.
Ben Affleck said he has learned from Matt Damon
Even after years of working together, Affleck said he learns something new every time he works with his longtime friend.
“Every time I act with Matt is a humbling experience because I learn to appreciate further just how good an actor he is,” Affleck said. “He is so understated, so real and so honest — it’s the opposite of a ‘showy’ performance, and I think what he does is more difficult.”
He said he deeply admires Damon’s skill in front of the camera.
“When you know someone as long as I’ve known Matt, you develop a pretty good sense of what is real and what isn’t and it’s almost impossible to catch Matt acting,” he said. “He is really a master of realism and it’s something I deeply admire about him. One of many things.”
They started auditioning together
Damon and Affleck have known each other since they were children. Affleck said his life changed when he met Damon.
“Matt gave acting a framework, an integration into the social hierarchy at school,” he told Parade. “As a teenager, the natural thing is to have friends who have common interests and so you fit together seamlessly. Before Matt, I was by myself. Acting was a solo activity where I’d just go off and do something, act in a little TV show or something, and no one understood it. None of the other kids knew what it was I did, how it worked, or anything.”
Because Damon also had an interest in acting, they started doing it together. By the time they were teenagers, they started auditioning together.
“When we were teenagers, like Matt was 16 and I was 14, we’d go together down to New York City [to audition for jobs],” Affleck said. “We’d take the train. Or sometimes we’d even take the airplane, back when there was the Eastern Shuttle or People’s Express. It cost like $20 to fly and you could smoke on the plane. We were smoking like idiots because we thought we were really supposed to be grown-up. It was pitiful.”
They remained close after graduating high school.
