Key Points
Matt Damon says losing out on a role in a major ’90s movie pushed him to finish Good Will Hunting.
Damon wrote and eventually won an Oscar for the film with his childhood friend, Ben Affleck.
The duo hoped the film would benefit their acting careers — and eventually, it did.
Good Will Hunting turned Matt Damon and his longtime pal Ben Affleck into overnight Hollywood sensations — and, in a way, they couldn’t have done it without the help of Edward Norton.
Damon recently joined his The Odyssey costar Tom Holland for a round of Complex’s GOAT (Greatest of All Time) game, which at one point saw them discuss their GOAT action movie. When Holland named Primal Fear as his, Damon revealed a piece of trivia about how the film ultimately fueled the creation of his Oscar-winning script.
“I have always really been blown away by Edward Norton’s performance in that film,” Holland remarked. “I’d love to have had the opportunity to have played that role.”
Damon, who actually auditioned for the part, couldn’t agree more. “It was a great, great, great role. I couldn’t believe that it made its way down to the masses,” he said, referencing the fact that the open auditions for the 1996 thriller welcomed actors of all experience levels. “It was actually a real impetus behind us writing Good Will Hunting.”
Damon explained that after he and Affleck both “went out for the role” and failed to land the part, they realized that an opportunity that good may never come their way again.
Edward Norton in ‘Primal Fear’Credit: Everett Collection
“[We] looked at each other, and we were like, ‘there’s never gonna be a role that good that comes down into the category of unknown actor, and we all can take a shot at it,’” Damon recalled, pointing out that ever if another role like that did emerge, it would still be “10,000 people going for this one thing.”
So, instead of waiting around for another chance, they decided to get serious about creating something for themselves.
“We really buckled down and wrote Good Will Hunting a little more desperately,” Damon said.
He added that it was fully out of “necessity” that they made the movie, telling Holland, “It’s very, very hard, as you know, to break in. The hardest jobs to get are the first ones you get.”
Primal Fear marked Norton’s film debut and arrived to much acclaim. The then-26-year-old actor earned a Golden Globe Award for his performance, along with an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Damon noted that in the end, it worked out as it should have, noting that Norton was “phenomenal in the movie.”
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in ‘Good Will Hunting’Credit: Prime
Meanwhile, he and Ben poured their energy into Good Will Hunting and were eventually rewarded for the effort. The film earned widespread acclaim and won them the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Damon has previously explained that the script began as a final project for a college class — for which he got an A — before it evolved into a career-changing project.
“Because of this professor’s reaction, I had enough confidence to show it to my friend (Affleck) and I said, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m stuck with this,’” Damon recalled during a joint interview with Affleck in 2023. “And Ben read it and he said, ‘I don’t know what to do either but we should do it together.’ And that was it.”
He added, “We didn’t have any aspirations to write— we really wanted jobs as actors. That was our entire goal.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aol.com ’
