Kevin Costner is reflecting on seeing Matt Damon and Ben Affleck get their start in Hollywood.
During the Tuesday, May 21, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Costner, 69, discussed working with Damon, 53, and Affleck, 51, when they were extras on 1989’s Field of Dreams.
“They were sitting in the stands, like college guys,” he recalled. “And they would both lean in at the same time, lean back at the same time, look at each other at the same time. And we talked. And they had this big enthusiasm. They were on fire. I do remember them, absolutely.”
While working on Field of Dreams, Affleck was 16 and Damon was 18. Jimmy Kimmel asked Damon to share his perspective about working with Costner, which he read live.
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“I remember it well. I literally had an Untouchables poster on my wall,” Damon wrote to Kimmel, 56, about Costner’s 1987 film The Untouchables. “He came out and hung around with the extras in between setups.”
Damon added: “I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘Shootin’ the s—t.’ And I laughed like a 12-year-old girl. It was a big deal for us because he had the exact career that we wanted. He was very nice to us.”
Affleck and Damon have been best friends and collaborators for decades. After growing up together in Massachusetts, the pair teamed up to write the script for 1997’s Oscar-winning screenplay Good Will Hunting.
“We rented this house on the beach in Venice and 800 people came and stayed with us and got drunk,” Affleck told Forbes in 2011. “Then we ran out of money and had to get an apartment. It was, like, everything was exciting. So we lived in Glendale and Eagle Rock and we lived in Hollywood, West Hollywood, Venice, by the Hollywood Bowl, all over the place. We’d get thrown out of some places or we’d have to upgrade or downgrade depending on who had money.”
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Affleck and Damon have since teamed up to work on School Ties, The Battle of Shaker Heights and The Last Duel. In 2001, they launched their HBO series Project Greenlight, an American documentary TV series focused on first-time filmmakers being given the chance to direct a feature film.
“This friendship has been essential and defining and so important to me in my life,” Affleck told Damon in a joint January 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There were a few critical times, which are private and I don’t want to share, but where your support was so profoundly meaningful to me that I don’t think I would’ve been able to be successful without you.”
