Matt Damon Watching Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, it’s hard not to get the vibe that this is more biographical of his life than we are led to believe. Granted, Damon is a talented actor, but there’s something more in the portrayal of the character of Will Hunting that keeps us wondering.
Like Will Hunting, Matt Damon grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. However, Will came from very modest blue-collar roots, and Matt came up from a more privileged background. His father, a tax preparer, and mother, early childhood professor, divorced when Matt was only two years old, and for a time he lived in a commune with his mother. Will had been abused as a child, but it’s doubtful the child of an early childhood professor was.
While Will worked as a janitor for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the plotline of the movie was that he was actually more intelligent than the students there, as well as some of the professors. Matt also attended a college in the Boston area – Harvard University. He dropped out just twelve credits shy of graduating in order to pursue his acting career.
Matt’s first role in a movie only gave him one line, but Mystic Pizza had him appearing in the movie with another up-and-comer, Julia Roberts, who was ironically enjoying her first starring role in a movie. Matt and Julia worked together again thirteen years later when both starred in Ocean’s Eleven and later it’s sequel Ocean’s Twelve, along with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Don Cheadle, and Casey Affleck, the brother of Matt’s childhood friend, Ben Affleck.
In more comparison’s to Will’s and Matt’s lives, Ben Affleck wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting along with Matt, and also had a supporting role in the movie as Will’s best friend. As newcomers to Hollywood, they were surprised to have actor/director Rob Reiner supporting this movie, which eventually added Robin Williams in a role as Will’s psychologist, earning him his first and only Academy Award, while Matt and Ben picked up awards for Best Screenplay. Ben and Matt had starred together in another movie that same year, Chasing Amy.
It’s starting to seem like the role of Will wasn’t much of a stretch for Matt. However, there were a few movies where he had to undergo some physical changes to pull off the part. To appear as the heroin addict in Courage Under Fire, Matt lost forty pounds in 100 days. In the end he was told he was lucky he didn’t end up with heart problems, but he did cause stress to his adrenal gland that caused him to be on medication for several years.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law, Matt lost thirty pounds and learned to play the piano for his role as Mr. Ripley. Later, he ended up having a large weight gain for his role as Greg Kinnear’s conjoined twin in Stuck on You. He ended up losing the weight all over again as he went through intensive training for his role as the amnesic in Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy. Matt’s romantic life seems to echo that of Will’s as well. It certainly isn’t coincidental that his girlfriend’s name in Good Will Hunting is Skylar, and his real-life girlfriend form his Harvard days is also named Skylar. Matt ended up dating the actress that played Skylar, Minnie Driver, for a few years. He broke up with her, and appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show with her a few weeks later, although it appeared that he broke up with her on the air. He has also dated Claire Danes and Winona Ryder, although he is now married to Luciana Bozán Barroso, whom he met while filming Stuck on You. They have two children – one together, and one from Luciana’s previous marriage. |
