Our Terms & Conditions | Our Privacy Policy
(Credit: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 19 April 2025 19:15, UK
Even though they’ve been best friends since childhood, who put their heads together to achieve their wildest dreams, was Matt Damon responsible for Ben Affleck’s first career downfall? Technically, yes. At the very least, a little bit.
After becoming simultaneous overnight sensations when their perseverance paid off in spades and won them an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, the Bostonian brothers from other mothers veered off in slightly different, but ultimately pivotal, directions in the aftermath of Good Will Hunting.
Damon took a filmmaker-focused approach to his career by shacking up with big-name auteurs and appearing in films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker, Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, and Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance.
Affleck, meanwhile, decided to try his luck at becoming a movie star through Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, Sandra Bullock’s rom-com Forces of Nature, and Jack Ryan reboot The Sum of All Fears. It worked for a while, but by the early 2000s, his mainstream credibility was lying in tatters.
Gigli deserves a lot of the blame, and rightly so. Martin Brest can’t even bring himself to mention the last movie he directed by name, and the media frenzy that surrounded Affleck and Jennifer Lopez ensured the knives were at their sharpest when it turned out to be one of the worst movies of the 21st century, if not ever.
2003 was definitely a year to forget for Affleck, who also headlined the comic book adaptation Daredevil and John Woo’s sci-fi actioner Paycheck on either side of Gigli. The two-time Oscar winner hates the former with an intense passion, while the latter tanked at the box office and sent John Woo into Hollywood exile for two decades.
Who’s to blame for that fall from grace that was only salvaged when Hollywoodland and Gone Baby Gone went a long way to salvaging his reputation? Affleck, of course, but also Damon, because he turned down the lead roles in both Daredevil and Paycheck, which did such a wonderful job of almost ruining his best friend’s livelihood.
“Matt was obviously flattered, but when he read the script and sat down with John, he said, ‘I can’t do two amnesia pictures or else people are going to say, ‘Why are you doing so many amnesia pictures?’” Affleck explained to UPI, alluding to The Bourne Identity. “So Matt phoned me and said, ‘I met with John Woo, it’s a really good script and you ought to check it out.’”
It wasn’t a good script, nor was it a good movie. As for Daredevil, he was Damon’s favourite comic book character as a kid, but the superhero genre gave him cold feet. “When that one came along, I chickened out,” he confessed. “I hadn’t seen the director’s work, and I didn’t know. So I just said, ‘No’. Ben was like, ‘I gotta do it.’”
It took years for Affleck to recover from the unholy trinity of Daredevil, Gigli, and Paycheck, which he may have been able to avoid had Damon not done him a solid, either by taking one of the parts or not convincing him that those terrible movies were worth making.
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter
Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.
Aggregated From –
Comments are closed.