Ben Affleck shares why he avoided working with Matt Damon
foxnews.comBen Affleck and Matt Damon are beginning a new era working together, but that wasn’t always the plan. Affleck explained why he avoided working with his longtime friend for years after the runaway success and their best original screenplay Oscar win for "Good Will Hunting," in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "One of the things we reflected on when we did ‘The Last Duel’ that caused us to want to do this company together was the fact that we wished we’d kept working together more over the years," Affleck told the outlet. "We fell prey to this idea that, ‘Well, if you don’t individuate your careers and do your own things, people will always associate you together.That will be limiting.’" "That was advice we got." Affleck and Damon did appear in a handful of films together throughout the years, and created the HBO filmmaking series "Project Greenlight" together, but after "Good Will Hunting" they didn’t collaborate for quite some time until they appeared together in Ridley Scott’s "The Last Duel" in 2021.
Now they’ve co-founded a new production company, Artists Equity. Affleck added, "The motivation behind making ‘Good Will Hunting’ was to serve as an acting reel so that we could get jobs as actors, not because we wanted to be writers.
So when we became successful and had the opportunity to do movies, we took them." "And it’s very hard to let go of that hand-to-mouth mentality you have as an actor," he explained. "The phone could stop ringing at any time, and especially where Matt and I grew up pretty modestly, it was almost irresponsible to not take a job where they were going to pay you a lot of money." The "Justice League" star continued, "My mother made, I don’t know, $30,000 a year as a public school.
Read more on foxnews.com