Ben Affleck and Matt Damon blew all the money they made from their Oscar winning film Good Will Hunting in just six months.
Affleck this week revealed that he and friend Damon managed to spend all the $600,000 (£480,000) that they made from their breakthrough film in just six months.
The pair, who wrote the screenplay for the film while still struggling actors, shared a bank account together and managed to clean out their entire savings – most of which went on a party house.
“When we sold Good Will Hunting I was like, ‘We are now rich for life. My needs are over. I will never have to work again,’” Affleck said during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, before he broke down how they spent their money.
He explained: “We sold it [the script] for $600,000 (£480,000), we split that, $300,000 (£240,000) each, and then the agents got $30,000 (£24,000).
“So we had $270,000 (£216,000), and we paid about $160,000 (£92,000) in taxes, so we had $110,000 (£88,000), each bought $55,000 (£44,000) Jeep Cherokees, and then had $55,000 left, which naturally we decided to rent a $5,000-a-month (£4000) party house on Glencoe Way by the Hollywood Bowl, and we were broke in six months.”
You can see the interview here:
“I always thought it was perfectly normal,” Affleck went on to tell Barrymore of sharing an account with his best friend.
Before the pair wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting, which eventually went on to win the Oscar for Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Robin Williams, the actors lived together in a small apartment in Los Angeles.
He continued: “We would work a little bit. We would do extra work, or a line here and there — the occasional Burger King commercial — and then take that money and put it in the account…
“We were friends and we wanted each other to succeed and we love each other, so it seemed clear like, ‘Let’s do this together,’ and in retrospect, really valuable because I think kind of starting out in a field like that can feel very lonely.”
The pair are currently starring on screen together once more in Air, which tells the story of how Nike created the Air Jordan sneaker with Michael Jordan. Affleck directs and co-stars in the film, and recently revealed Jordan had some demands if he was going to give his blessing to the film.
The pair also recently co-starred and wrote Ridley Scott’s medieval epic The Last Duel, which they proudly declared to be a feminist film.