The screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s 1997 drama “Good Will Hunting” turned Ben Affleck and Matt Damon into Oscar winners, but it didn’t make them rich for very long. During a recent visit to “The Drew Barrymore Show” (via IndieWire), Affleck confirmed the duo were broke six months after earning a $600,000 paycheck from selling the “Good Will Hunting” script.
“When we sold ‘Good Will Hunting’ I thought we were now rich for life,” Affleck said. “My needs are over! I’ll never have to work again! I’m rich forever! We sold [the script] for $600,000. We split that, $300,000 each, and then the agents got $30,000, so we had $270,000. We paid about $160,000 in taxes so we had $110,000. We each bought $55,000 Jeep Cherokees and then had $55,000 left.”
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Affleck added, “Naturally we decided to rent a $5,000-a-month party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl and we were broke in six months.”
The “Good Will Hunting” experience certainly taught Affleck and Damon a lesson in how to save a Hollywood paycheck. Just last month, Damon and Affleck revealed to Variety that the duo had been courted to script a “Good Will Hunting” sequel.
“Someone just tried to pitch Ben ‘Good Will Hunting 2,’” Damon said. “I shit you not — that happened. He told me today. He was like, ‘You’re not going to believe what I heard.’ This was a flat-out sequel. I don’t get it.”
When asked for details, Affleck laughed: “It’s not a sequel we’re going to pursue.”
The two actors also revealed on a March episode of “The Bill Simmons Podcast” that they shared a bank account as young actors before “Good Will Hunting” turned them into industry heavyweights.
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“It was unusual, but we needed the money for auditions,” Damon said, calling it “a weird thing in retrospect.”
“We were going to help each other and be there for each other,” Affleck said. “It was like, ‘You’re not going to be alone. I’m not going to be alone. Let’s go out there and do this together.’”
Any time Affleck or Damon booked a role, the money from the gig would get deposited into the bank account. As Damon explained, “As long as one of us had money we knew the power wasn’t going to get shut off. After doing [1992′s] ‘Geronimo’ I probably had 35 grand in the bank. I was like, ‘We’re good for a year.’”
Of course there were rules, but they were somewhat stretched.
“You were allowed to go to [auditions in] New York with the money. You were allowed to take out $10 and get quarters and go to [the arcade] and play video games,” Damon said. “Eventually we were allowed to try to buy beer, which never fucking worked.”
Affleck and Damon most recently starred together in Affleck’s Michael Jordan-Nike drama “Air.”
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