Matt Damon on his 43-year friendship with the other Affleck (Casey, that is)

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are born and bred Bostonians. It’s where they grew up, lived together and then starred in their breakout hit Good Will Hunting (for which Damon won an Oscar with his co-writer, that other Affleck – and Casey’s older brother – Ben).

But when Damon and Affleck returned to Boston to shoot their new film The Instigators, the reaction from locals was less starstruck and more nonplussed. “It’s right in the neighbourhood, so you might as well,” shrugged one woman, who told local news site boston.com she was a “little bit” of a Damon fan as she waited to watch filming. Another complained, “What a mess. Freakin’ Boston, you guys.”

Seems they’re not so much hometown heroes as just inconveniently in the way.

“Boston has its own tall poppy syndrome, like Australia, you know, it’s the same thing,” says Damon, laughing. “Look, it’s a very blue-collar town. It’s like, don’t get too big for your britches, you know, stay humble. Don’t start thinking you’re better than anybody. That’s very baked into the culture and who we are. You know [and here he slips into a peak Boston accent], ‘You’re not better than me.’ That’s a very Boston thing.”

Affleck: “Matt, you were saying [Chris] Hemsworth has gotten too big for his britches.”

Damon: “Definitely. You gotta cut him down.”

The pair, who I am talking to over Zoom, are sitting next to each other in director’s chairs, Affleck wearing a cap and slightly slumped, while Damon leans forward, always eager to keep the conversation flowing, thrilled that I’m talking to them from Australia.

“Are you in Sydney right now?” he asks, while Affleck mutters a “hey”.

I am.

“Oh wow. Thank you so much for getting up for us.” (Please, there are few actors I have watched more consistently than Damon, while Affleck is, arguably, a much better actor than his brother.)

The Instigators is Affleck’s baby, a darkly humorous crime caper about a desperate father, Rory (Damon), and an ex-jailbird, Cobby (Affleck), who are recruited to rob a local politician on election night. When the plot goes awry, Rory’s therapist (Hong Chau) gets caught up in the action as they try to outrun not only the police but also the gangsters who hired them to do the job.

Affleck wrote The Instigators with another Bostonian, Chuck MacLean, the showrunner behind the Boston crime drama City on a Hill (sensing a theme here?) because he was nostalgic for the buddy comedies he grew up with.

“I just hadn’t seen one in a long time that was really great and I actually had never been able to be in one,” he says. “There’s a few of them that I watched growing up and then watched with my kids – Midnight Run, even The Sting is kind of a buddy comedy – and they’re some of my favourite movies. I just really wanted to do a good one.”

He didn’t write it with Damon in mind, though – “I always send him movies to do as an actor, and he never wants to do them. So I stopped dreaming,” says Affleck. He did want Damon to direct, though. But, again, Damon said no.

The person who did convince Damon to take on The Instigators was his wife, Luciana Barroso, who stepped in as a producer, along with Damon and Ben Affleck and their company Artists Equity.

“I feel like I have to defend myself here,” says Damon. “I do love Casey’s writing, and I love every chance I can to work with him. And then once we started talking about it, and once we got [director] Doug Liman on board … it was really exciting to re-team with people from different parts of my life, and I just had a feeling it was going to be a great experience, and it was.”

It was Liman who directed Damon in the first of the Jason Bourne films, The Bourne Identity, where he sent him screaming through the streets of Paris in a beat-up Mini. In The Instigators, the action is just as frenetic, but Damon’s character, Rory, is not as adept at handling the heat as Jason Bourne.

Was Damon nervous about being beaten up by Liman again?

“Oh god no, no, no,” he says. “Doug, I think, has an unfair reputation for being chaotic when he works, but there’s a difference. There’s a creative chaos that’s really good and that leads to the great movies that he makes. But actually Doug and I and Artists Equity, our company, put our own money up. We were the backstop if the film went over budget. That’s how much I trust him.

“I was so sure that we were going to come in on budget, and we did, and there was never really a doubt about it. So hopefully, that puts to rest this kind of accusation that Doug is out of control because that is the thing that’s been dogging his reputation for 20 years now, I think unfairly.”

Affleck, meanwhile, was nervous he wouldn’t be able to live up to Liman’s Bourne standards.

“If you look at Bourne, Matt is perfect in that movie,” says Affleck. “And it’s hard to do. I have more appreciation for it now because you do it in these teeny, tiny little moments. All that action is shot in three-second little bits. It’s not easy as an actor, and … at the time [of filming], I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull this off.’ I’ve never done that kind of action, but with a little bit of Matt yelling at me, telling me I’m doing it wrong, how to do it better, and Doug being patient, we got there.”

The Instigators marks the seventh time Damon and Affleck have worked together on screen – from their breakthrough in Good Will Hunting in 1997 through to Steven Soderbergh’s three Ocean’s capers, plus Gus Van Sant’s Gerry and last year’s Oscar winner Oppenheimer – far more than Damon has ever worked on screen with Ben Affleck.

They put their partnership down to a 43-year friendship that began when Damon and Ben Affleck met as 10 and eight-year-olds in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from the city of Boston. The older Affleck then introduced Damon to his five-year-old brother. They all shared the same high school drama teacher, and when Damon and Ben Affleck sat down to write and then shoot Good Will Hunting, Casey was there, too.

“I remember how good Casey was in that movie,” says Damon. “Ben and I always said he was the best actor in the movie. But I do remember the first day of filming, Ben and I were in the front seat of a car, Casey was in the back. We were shooting this scene and Gus [Van Sant, the director] says action, and Casey goes, ‘Can I get a double burger? [Damon does this in a super-broad Boston accent]’

“And I turned around in my seat and looked at him, like, if you mess up our movie, that we spent five years getting to this point, and he just looked at me and he was like, ‘I know what I’m doing. Guys, don’t worry, I know what I’m doing’, because we tend to like to do things more naturally, but Casey was taking a big swing, and luckily, it worked.”

Adds Affleck: “From my perspective, up until that point, we had all just been trying to get jobs in other people’s things, more or less. And that was a case of the mountain coming to Muhammad a little bit. It was like, wow, these dudes had written something and gotten a good director, like a real director I’d actually worked with before [in 1995’s To Die For] and held in very high regard, and now he’s coming to do something that they had written.

“That was a big deal. And I didn’t think this [at the time], but looking back, it must have changed my attitude completely about what you can do in the industry. You don’t have to just be, you know, hat in hand, door to door, looking for a job. You can make it.”

These days, Damon isn’t so worried about Affleck taking a big swing. At 53 and 48, respectively, they have the kind of deep friendship they agree is rare in an industry that’s built on finding the next shiny new thing.

“There are patches where we don’t see each other a lot,” says Damon. “And also having families, you know, it’s like you go away to work, and you come home, and it’s a very inward-looking time in your life when you have little kids.

“But I knew what he was doing, and he knew what I was doing, and we’d talk on the phone [and] try to get certain projects that we could do together. But it is great to have friendships that sustain over that long of a time. Obviously, with Casey and with Ben, those [old friendships] are really rare things to have in your life. I know now in my 50s, it’s very hard to maintain friendships in this business, and so they’re very precious when you do.”

Affleck, not surprisingly, agrees. “I mean, he’s a beautiful guy. Matt is really one of my best friends in the whole world. And I think a lot of people would say that he’s a very giving, supportive, great, great friend, and kind of always has been.”

Speaking of great friends, Damon has spent quite a bit of time in Australia over the last few years, holidaying with Chris Hemsworth (hence the earlier sledge). While he has been spotted in the usual hotspot of Byron Bay, it was Damon’s appearance at Brisbane’s agricultural show, the Ekka, last year that made the national news.

“It’s been two years in a row,” he says happily. “We’re not coming for as long this year, so we might already be out of the country by the time the Ekka’s on. But I hope so. I mean, I’ve had two amazing days there the last two years running, and the kids love it.”

Has he ever invited Affleck?

“No, he hasn’t,” says Affleck, shaking his head.

“There are some things I like to keep to myself,” replies Damon.

The Instigators premieres on Friday, August 9, on Apple TV+.

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