Ben Affleck Was 25 When He and Matt Damon Won Their Oscar
Ben Affleck has known Matt Damon since he was eight. They went to the same high school in Cambridge, wrote Good Will Hunting together, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1998, when Affleck was 25. Nearly thirty years later they are still in business together.
Credit Wikipedia
Ben Affleck has known Matt Damon since he was eight years old.
They grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, went to the same school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin, and became close friends there. The screenplay that made both of them famous came out of that friendship, not out of a studio.
The Film They Wrote Themselves
Good Will Hunting was released in 1997. Affleck and Damon wrote it together and shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the ceremony in 1998.
Affleck was 25 years old. He was born Benjamin Géza Affleck-Boldt in Berkeley, California, on August 15, 1972.
Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor for the same film at the same ceremony.
Via the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Timeline
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| August 15, 1972 | Ben Affleck born in Berkeley, California |
| Around 1980 | Meets Matt Damon. Affleck is eight |
| 1997 | Good Will Hunting is released |
| January 11, 1998 | President Clinton hosts a screening of the film at Camp David |
| March 1998 | Affleck and Damon win Best Original Screenplay |
| 1998 | The two set up Pearl Street Films together |
| 2000 | Affleck co-founds LivePlanet with Sean Bailey and Chris Moore |
| 2007 | Directs his first feature, Gone Baby Gone |
| 2012 | Directs Argo, which wins Best Picture |
| 2023 | Air, the first release from Artists Equity, the company he co-owns with Damon |
| October 9, 2026 | Animals, directed by and starring Affleck, is released on Netflix |
What Happened After
Affleck did not stay a screenwriter. He became a director, and a consistent one.
Gone Baby Gone came in 2007, The Town in 2010, Argo in 2012, Live by Night in 2016, Air in 2023, and Animals, released by Netflix on October 9, 2026. He directed Animals and also stars in it, playing a Los Angeles mayoral candidate.
Argo won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Wikipedia's summary credits Affleck with two Academy Awards in total, the screenplay award and Argo's Best Picture win, which he shared as a producer.
He also played Batman across five appearances, starting with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad in 2016, Justice League in 2017, the Zack Snyder cut in 2021, and a cameo in The Flash.
They Never Stopped Being Business Partners
This is the part of the story that most profiles skip.
In 1998, the year of the Oscar, Affleck and Damon set up Pearl Street Films together. Twenty five years later they co-own Artists Equity, whose first release was Air in 2023.
Two kids from the same Cambridge high school wrote a script because nobody would cast them in anything good, won the industry's writing award for it, and are still each other's business partners nearly three decades later.
Via the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
JenzNews Take: The thing worth noticing is not the Oscar. It is that the partnership outlasted it by thirty years. Hollywood friendships that start before anyone is famous usually do not survive one of the two becoming more famous, and both of these men have taken turns being the bigger name. They wrote their own way in at 25 because nobody was offering them the parts they wanted, and the lesson they appear to have drawn from that is to keep owning the thing rather than waiting to be hired for it. Artists Equity is the same move they made in 1997, with better financing.
The Short Version
Affleck and Damon met when Affleck was eight. They wrote Good Will Hunting together, won Best Original Screenplay in 1998, founded Pearl Street Films that same year, and co-own Artists Equity today.
