The childhood friends from Boston won for their script for the hit film that also starred Robin Williams.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are still embarrassed by their *Good Will Hunting *Oscar acceptance speech

The childhood friends from Boston won for their script for the hit film that also starred Robin Williams.

By Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt

Raechal Shewfelt is a writer at **. She has been working at EW since 2024. Her work has previously appeared on Yahoo and in American *Journalism Review* and *The Shreveport Times*.

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on January 12, 2026 6:45 p.m. ET

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Ben Affleck and Matt Damon hold up their Oscars at the 1998 Academy Awards. Credit:

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have good memories of their 1997 movie *Good Will Hunting*, which won them both Oscars for their script. Their acceptance speech? Not so much.

"Oh, god," Affleck said Monday on SiriusXM's *The Howard Stern Show* when the host brought up the topic. "I just feel so... like, I thanked Boston as a city three times. Was that necessary?"

The film, which costarred Minnie Driver, Stellan Skarsgård, Casey Affleck, Cole Hauser, and the late Robin Williams, told the story of Damon's Will Hunting, a school janitor found to have a genius intellect.

In addition to Affleck and Damon, Williams took home a Best Supporting Actor trophy for his role as Will's counselor. The movie was also nominated in seven other categories, including for Damon's performance and for Best Picture. (It lost to *Titanic*.)**

But despite its many nominations going into the evening, Affleck and Damon, longtime friends who grew up in Boston, hadn't expected to win at all.

"The funny thing about it, actually," Damon said, "the reason it's kind of disorganized was because we never ever had a conversation between ourselves about what we would say. because honestly, each of us knew deep down that if we had that conversation and didn't win, in 50 years we'd be at some bar in Boston going 'Can you f'ing believe we f'ing wrote an Oscars speech? You jackass.' So when we got up there, I remember I pushed Ben into the microphone. I was like, 'I'm not doing it.'"

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Affleck hadn't expected that either.

"I'm like, 'What am I supposed to say?'" the *Argo* director and star said. "So I do, in some ways, think it would have been smart to think a little bit about what I was going to say in front of the whole world."

In fact, Affleck said on the stage, while holding his new hardware, that he had just told Damon that winning would be "really, really scary."

Damon noted on Stern that they ended up thanking "a number of people multiple times."

Affleck underscored that it was a huge moment in their careers.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are longtime best friends.

Cindy Ord/Getty

"The year before that Oscars, we watched the show in Somerville, Mass., in a little apartment like everybody else, just totally on the outside," he said. "So it still felt like we were the people watching the show who, all of a sudden, the screen opened up and you walked into it, like one of those weird dreams."

Affleck recalled that the year's host, Billy Crystal, had even mentioned him and Damon from the stage. The two saw each other recently, Affleck said, and told him what that had meant to him.

"I said, 'You know, Billy, that will always stay with me in my life,'" said Affleck, who went on to win another Oscar as producer for Best Picture winner *Argo* and roles like *Justice League*'s Batman. "I had been watching him doing the Oscars from home, and then we get nominated, which is a shock to me, and we’re there, and he comes out and his first bit is to do a song: 'Matt and Ben, Ben and Matt.’ It truly blew me away."

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For Damon, it was simply too much to take in at the time.

"It was way too much to metabolize," said Damon, who next stars as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's epic, *The Odyssey*, releasing July 17. "It took years, I think, for it to kind of sink in."

Affleck and Damon star together in the new Netflix movie *The Rip*, which is about Miami cops who find millions in cash in a Miami stash house, which causes team members to question who's really on their side. Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun, and Kyle Chandler also costar.

*The Rip* is available Jan. 16 on Netflix.**

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