Ben Affleck and Matt Damon looked back at their first Academy Award win and cringed.
Appearing together on Sirius XM’s The Howard Stern Show, Affleck confessed that he still feels awkward about the acceptance speech they gave in 1998 when Good Will Hunting won Best Original Screenplay.
“Oh, god,” Affleck said. “I just feel so… like, I thanked Boston as a city three times. Was that necessary?”
Damon agreed the speech was “disorganized”.
They explained that neither of them thought they would actually win.
“…we never had a conversation between ourselves about what we would say,” Damon admitted.
“…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 believed 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.'”
The Argo director and star recalled being caught off guard when Damon pushed him toward the microphone.
“I’m like, ‘What am I supposed to say?’” Jennifer Garner’s ex remembered.
“.it would have been smart to think a little bit about what I was going to say in front of the whole world.”
Despite the embarrassment, both actors acknowledged the surreal nature of the night.
“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.”
The film earned nine nominations including Best Actor for Damon and Best Supporting Actor for Robin Williams who won.
Good Will Hunting ultimately lost Best Picture to Titanic.
Affleck and Damon remain close collaborators today too.
They recently worked together in Netflix’s The Rip, premiering January 16, about Miami cops who stumble upon millions in cash inside a stash house.
