Why Matt Damon And Ben Affleck Wrote Explicit Gay Sex Scenes Into “Good Will Hunting”
Back in the mid-1990s, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were two unknown actors trying to sell their screenplay for Good Will Hunting. They had already sold the rights to Castle Rock Entertainment, but something felt off.
Ben Affleck as Chuckie Sullivan in Good Will Hunting (1997) Dir. Gus Van Sant pic.twitter.com/sMw3L2dczz
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The studio kept requesting rewrites. Damon and Affleck would submit them. Nobody said a word about the content. Were the executives even reading the pages?
The pair decided to find out.
Testing who was actually paying attention.
They started slipping graphic gay sex scenes into the script. Not between main characters Will (Damon) and Chuckie (Affleck). Between the two professors: therapist Sean Maguire, later played by Robin Williams, and mathematician Gerald Lambeau, played by Stellan Skarsgård.
“We started writing in screen direction like, ‘Sean talks to Will and unloads his conscience.’ And then: ‘Will takes a moment and then gives Sean a soulful look and leans in and starts blowing him,'” Affleck told Boston Magazine in 2013.
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Film: GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997) pic.twitter.com/EB1p4evl8m
They kept submitting these rewrites. Still nothing.
“We would turn that in, and they wouldn’t ever mention all those scenes where Sean and Will were jerking each other off,” Affleck recalled.
Damon added that the scenes were “literally probably a full paragraph about what these two characters were doing to each other.”
Only one person noticed.
When the pair finally met with Harvey Weinstein at Miramax, he brought it up within minutes.
“About page 60, this whole big sex scene. What the hell is that? Because the guys are straight, and there’s no hint of anything like that. I don’t get that scene,” Weinstein said on The Graham Norton Show in 2015.
Damon and Affleck had their answer. He was the only executive who had actually read the script properly. They gave Miramax the movie.
Good Will Hunting (1997), dir. Gus Van Santpic.twitter.com/xmffGkmpKb
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The outcome speaks for itself.
Good Will Hunting went on to earn over $200 million at the worldwide box office. It won two Academy Awards in 1998: Best Original Screenplay for Damon and Affleck, and Best Supporting Actor for Robin Williams.
And those explicit scenes? They never made it anywhere near the final cut. They were never meant to.
In a recent interview on the All The Smoke podcast, Affleck reflected on their stunt with a grin: “We thought we were being punks and could do stit like that.”
It worked. Sometimes you have to get a little creative to see who’s really in your corner.
